#jimmy put the board in the oven

[willgrahamsbecoming]

this is sassy science (with jack observing)

[scribbling-dragon]

Watcher’s Nest Café

Chapter 6

summary:

“It’s open,” he calls, just loud enough to be heard.

He waits, and then a moment later the door creaks open, the sound of feet shuffling over carpet reaching his ears. “Take your shoes off.”

“What if I’d been a murderer?”

(ao3 link)

(masterpost)

(3,412 words)

It’s exactly nine pm on a mediocre Tuesday evening when someone knocks at his door. He pauses, listening as the person knocks twice in rapid succession, then pauses, and a quieter, third knock follows not long after.

He turns back to his pan, poking at the noodles with a fork, swirling them around in the boiling water. “It’s open,” he calls, just loud enough to be heard.

He waits, and then a moment later the door creaks open, the sound of feet shuffling over carpet reaching his ears. “Take your shoes off.”

“What if I’d been a murderer?” Jimmy asks. Scott waits, not turning around to face him yet, still poking at the noodles. The steam rising off the pot warms his hands, even through his gloves, and he appreciates the small shred of warmth it gives him even as condensation collects on his gloves.

The radiator rattles in the corner, sounding far more like something getting ready to explode than something that heats his apartment. He continues waiting, listening as Jimmy sighs heavily, as though incredibly put-upon, and slips his shoes off. He ruins the moment by chucking them towards the front door, missing by several inches. They slam into the wall instead.

“Very few murderers are polite enough to knock, Jimmy dear,” he brushes past Jimmy - there’s hardly enough space for one person in this kitchen, let alone two - reaching over him and into the top cupboard, pulling one of the bowls down. “And even fewer are kind enough to bring me wine.”

Jimmy grips the bottle of wine a little tighter, glancing down at it, looking surprised, as though he only just remembered he had it. “Oh, uh, yes,” Jimmy laughs, holding it out towards Scott.

Scott quirks an eyebrow, hands full of boiling hot pan and the other making sure his dinner doesn't get washed down the sink as he drains the water away. Jimmy clears his throat and sets it on the side, careful to slide it as far away from the edge as possible. Scott appreciates it, one wine stain on his carpet is enough.

“Any particular thing we’re celebrating?” He asks, “As far as I was aware, the party isn't until Friday.”

“It isn't,” Jimmy shuffles back and forth on the spot, wings flexing. Scott almost smiles a little at the action, reminded of a much younger Jimmy doing almost the exact same thing when he asked if he wanted to be friends. “Can't I just come see my friend?”

“Best friend,” Scott corrects, sitting at the table. Jimmy sits down across from him, though he’s wise enough not to lean his arms on the table. It wobbles, rather badly, and is currently propped up by several wadded pieces of paper and hope. And probably some kind of divine intervention too. “And not with wine that expensive.”

“It wasn't that expensive,” Jimmy tries to protest, but he already sounds like he’s giving up on his own argument. Scott nods along, beginning to eat his noodles, waiting for Jimmy to cave. “It was on offer.” Jimmy says.

“You cheaping out on me?”

“You were just-!” Jimmy cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “Are you eating instant noodles again?”

“I had an apple while I made them.”

“Scott,”

“Jimmy,” he parrots back, eating another mouthful of noodles. “They're cheap and easy, it is nine at night. I'm not about to bust out the chopping board and hope the oven works properly.”

“You sound like me,” Jimmy jokes, smiling. He doesn't move to do anything else, but he keeps his eyes carefully averted from Scott as he eats, something that Scott finds himself appreciating despite how much he wants to hate it.

“Yeah, but there’s something actually wrong with my oven. You just touch it and it explodes.”

“That was a microwave.”

“Not my point,” Scott leans back in his chair, meeting Jimmy’s eyes for a moment before Jimmy looks away again. “Why’re you here?” He grins, “Wait, no, let me guess…there’s paper covering every inch of free space?”

Jimmy groans, head thunking down to the table. It wobbles precariously, groaning like it’s going to give in and collapse beneath the weight of air and his bowl. He almost expects it to, with Jimmy sat across from him- that definitely cancels out whatever divine intervention that’s kept this table standing for as long as it has. It remains standing, by some miracle. Maybe another divine intervention.

“I love him,” Jimmy says, “and his projects are genius, but I wish he could keep them at least a little bit contained. Just one table, that’s all I want. I’d even take half a table at this point!”

Scott pushes Jimmy backwards, removing his head from the table, when the wood creaks dangerously again. He pulls his bowl backwards as well, cradling it in his hands as he watches his table carefully, ready for the moment of betrayal.

“What’s he working on this time?”

“Decked Out,” Jimmy smiles to himself, probably doesn't even realise he’s doing it. “The idea’s really good, it’s looking great, you know?” Scott’s seen the schematics maybe once in the years he’s known Tango, and even the sketches he saw are nothing compared to what Jimmy tells him about.

“Yeah,” he nods along. The last mouthful of noodles are cold, but he eats them anyway and stands. The bowl gets dumped in the sink, and he promises he’s going to wash it before he wakes in a cold sweat, visions of his sink being overtaken by mould in his mind. That only happened the once, and he fixed it. Everything was fine afterwards, even if everything stank of bleach. “You want the fancy glasses?”

“As long as you have some to spare.” Jimmy jokes. Scott has several of his favourite wine glasses, fancy ones that he pulls out when he wants to mope on the sofa with Jimmy, or gossip about something and feel far more successful than he actually is.

“I always do,” he pulls the two nearest the edge out, setting them on the side. “Sit on the sofa, I’ll be over in a moment.”

Jimmy doesn't reply, but he does hear the squeaking of the sofa a moment later. He fills the glasses halfway, aware that they're going to be drinking straight from the bottle after the second glass.

He sets the bottle down on his side of the sofa, far away from any stray hands or wings that might try and knock it over. He presses the glass into Jimmy’s hands, not releasing it until he’s certain that Jimmy’s got a good enough grip on it to not spill it over himself. He settles on the other side of the sofa, tucking his legs beneath himself.

“How’s Lizzie?” He asks. He hasn't seen her around very much, just in brief glimpses as she visits the café, sometimes with Joel and sometimes not.

“She’s doing great,” Jimmy smiles, taking a sip of his wine. Scott does the same, settling further into the cushions. He can hear the clock ticking from the doorway, has to resist the urge to glance over at it, to watch as the hand ticks around and around, counting down the seconds of his evening. He continues to watch Jimmy.

“She’s been helping out at the vets, right?” He asks, “The one around the corner from,” he gestures vaguely, but Jimmy seems to get what he means anyway.

“Yeah,” he nods, “yeah, she has. Really been enjoying it too, even if some of the animals are…difficult.” Jimmy winces.

“The animals or the owners?”

“The animals. Mostly. Some people asked her whether it was ethical for her to work in a vets with all the animals.”

“And I'm certain that went fantastic.” Scott laughs, absently swirling the wine in his glass, watching as it sloshes against the rim, threatening to spill over.

“Oh, yeah. All the people there love her, she was pretty sure the receptionist was gonna vault over his desk to throttle them. She was very polite about it all, much more polite than I would have been.”

“Probably too nice,” he mutters.

“Oh, nah, she told them the rabbit needed specialist food. Super expensive kind, all the staff knew what she was doing and let it happen. The owner didn't even realise, was more flustered about the fact everyone looked like they were gonna kill her.”

“Same person would probably have a fit over you two being related.”

“Genetics is fucked,” Jimmy shrugs. “My mum didn't even know that there were cat genes on her side. Apparently it was my great-great-nan’s sister. Or something.”

“Quite a connection.”

Jimmy hums, tapping a finger against the edge of his glass. It rings quietly in the silence that follows. Scott would turn the TV on, but the remote is just out of reach and he can't be bothered to stretch and grab it. His feet ache from being stood all day, and his leg feels three different kinds of wrong at the moment. The clock ticks on in the background.

He sits up. “More wine?”

“We have work in the morning,” Jimmy says, frowning at him. He already seems a little softer around the edges, the alcohol loosening his limbs and leaving his brain a little slower.

“And I'm your boss, hardly gonna tell you off for coming in hungover.”

“But you're gonna be fine tomorrow,” Jimmy whines, “it’s not fair.”

“If you want someone to feel miserable alongside you, find another drinking buddy.” He fills Jimmy’s glass halfway again. “You knew what you were getting into when you came here, even if you stood outside for ten minutes and shuffled back and forth.”

“You heard that?” Jimmy’s cheeks tinge pink.

“Course I did,” his fins wiggle for emphasis, “I can hear everything.”

“No you can't.”

“Deidre below us definitely can. And she’s going to be up here, asking about that lovely boy that was over last night, and, oh, what was his name?”

“That’s a horrible impression of her,” Jimmy laughs. “Isn't she like, eighty? Why does she care?”

“She thinks I'm lonely.” He shrugs. “She’s sweet, really, if far too nosy. Likes to drop round a lasagne every once in a while. Tell me I'm not eating enough.”

“You don't eat enough,” Jimmy frowns. “What number did you say she lived at?”

“I didn't.” Jimmy kicks him and Scott kicks him back, digging the heel of his foot into Jimmy’s ribs. “For this exact reason.”

“Alright, alright,” Jimmy smacks at his ankle, twisting away from him, wine getting dangerously close to spilling everywhere. “You've made your point.” He digs his heel in, just a little bit more, before tucking his leg beneath him again. Jimmy settles back into the sofa cushions, squishing himself down until he looks ready to fall asleep. Scott watches his wine glass carefully. “I don't have anything else to talk about now,” Jimmy frowns.

“I'm sure you’ll come up with something.” The silence isn't as bad as it could be, nowhere near as oppressive as the silence in his apartment normally is. Normally, it’s dead quiet, the sound of the fridge humming is quiet, everything overshadowed by the ticking of the clock. A constant reminder of the seconds slipping past, tumbling out of his grasp no matter how hard he tries to grab onto them.

Jimmy, here, present, in his apartment; just another human being sitting beside him on the sofa is enough to push that claustrophobic feeling back, dispelling it with the sounds of feathers rustling against each other and the shifting of fabric as Jimmy fidgets.

Jimmy makes a small noise in the back of his throat, perking up. Scott watches him from the corner of his eye, smiling into his wine glass. His smile quickly fades as Jimmy’s grin from finding a topic of conversation turns to a smirk as he settles comfortably back into the cushion behind himself, kicking his feet into Scott’s lap.

“You've been smiling more at work recently.”

“Have I?” He hasn't noticed if he has been. His thoughts have been occupied with other matters at work recently. “I hadn't noticed.”

“Mhm.” Jimmy’s nodding along, smiling like he knows something Scott doesn't. He doesn't like the feeling. Normally he’s the one smiling at Jimmy like that- does it always feel so horrible? He scowls at Jimmy, flicking him on the ankle.

“Out with it,” he demands. “What’s got you sat there like the cat that got the canary?”

“Ouch,” Jimmy says. “Maybe choose your words a little more carefully next time.”

Scott doesn't respond, preparing to flick Jimmy again. Jimmy obviously senses this as he begins to talk. Smart guy.

“I'm talking about Martyn,” Jimmy shimmies his shoulders. One of his wings wedges itself a little further between the cushions with the motion, though Jimmy doesn't seem to care. “You smile at him- even Pix noticed! He asked me if there was something going on.”

“There’s nothing going on.” He says. “And you can tell Pix that.”

“But do you want there to be something going on?” Jimmy asks, and all traces of his joking from before disappear, as though they’d never been there in the first place. The sudden switch leaves Scott feeling very disoriented- he’s been feeling off-kilter since Jimmy sat down with him. It’s like the rug has been ripped out from beneath him and he’s still not hit the ground, still falling. “Because, I, ugh,” Jimmy tips forward and Scott jolts, prepared to catch his glass if he drops it (he seriously will not be getting his deposit back if Jimmy spills wine on his carpet), but Jimmy just groans, cradling his head in one hand. “How the hell do I explain this?”

“I think you're taking this too seriously.” Scott says, taking a sip of wine. Jimmy looks up at him, a gleam in his eye, promptly reminding Scott that he’s far too sober for this conversation.

“So there is something!” Jimmy sounds far too triumphant right now. “Aw, I knew it. Pearl’s gonna be so pissed.”

“You're rather invested in this,” he comments.

“Course I am,” Jimmy pokes his foot into Scott’s stomach, the warm weight of his legs across Scott’s increasing for a moment before decreasing again. “You're my best friend, I want to see you happy.”

Scott hums, low and in the back of his throat as he considers what Jimmy’s just said. He hasn't been thinking about it, trying his best not to, really. To think about it would mean he’d have to make a decision on what to do about it. And lingering in silence isn't going very well for him so far, if his friends have noticed it so easily. The thought that his friends might have spoken about him, spoken about this, makes him feel a little uncomfortable, warm with embarrassment.

He takes another sip, refusing to meet Jimmy’s eyes.

“Martyn’s nice too,” Jimmy continues. “He’s studying marine bio, and he seems good at it. But he’s also a nice guy, everyone that knows him has nothing but good things to say.”

“You don't need to pitch him to me, Jimmy.” He cracks a smile at the sheer absurdity of it all, looking up to meet Jimmy’s eyes. They're shining with something like excitement, and it’s almost bright enough to cover up the sadness underneath, the lingering emotion that Jimmy never wants to address, even when it creeps up on him.

“Oh, that’s fantastic, you know, he said-”

“You don't have to feel bad, Jimmy.” He says it before he can stop himself. And maybe he really should stop drinking while he has these conversations. Maybe he’d be able to keep a few more of his thoughts to himself, tucked neatly away where his friends can only guess at them. He used to be far better at it.

“I don't feel bad, what are you talking about?”

Scott smiles, tilting his head to the side as he considers the way Jimmy is smushed into the sofa cushions, head leaning against it, feet resting on Scott's lap. His feathers are ruffled and his eyes are tired. It’s late, and they both have a morning shift tomorrow.

“Did you want to stay here?” He asks, ignoring the small flash of disappointment in Jimmy’s eyes, looking around the room instead. The clock ticks in the background, slowly inching their way towards ten. The radiator has ceased its rattling, but only because the heating’s been switched off.

“I- not if it’s inconvenient for you.” Jimmy makes to stand, empty wine glass held loosely, close to slipping free from his hand. Scott takes it from him carefully, pushing him back into the sofa.

“I'm not going to make you walk back to yours this late.” He says, quietly. Everything feels far too loud right now, his heart beating uncomfortably loud in his ears. The comfort of five minutes prior has evaporated, leaving him far more sober than he wants to be. Jimmy watches him carefully, before clearly leaning back into the sofa.

Scott leaves the pair of glasses on the counter, beside the sink. Beside the pot that he’s going to wash tomorrow. Leaving it overnight makes his skin crawl, thinking of what he could emerge to find in the morning- but he knows now that mould can't spread that fast or far.

Jimmy’s eyes are shut when he steps back towards the sofa, his head tilted at an awkward angle and wings twisted behind him. He jabs him between the ribs, ducking as Jimmy flails at him before realising who it is and settling back grumpily. “You don't have to do that every time you know.”

“You sleep like the dead,” Scott informs him, for possibly the thousandth time in their friendship. “C’mon, you've slept on the sofa once, and that was punishment enough for everyone you interacted with that day.”

“I can't make you sleep on the sofa,” Jimmy protests.

“Which is why I won't be sleeping on the sofa.” Jimmy frowns at him. “My bed is plenty big enough for two, the worst danger is waking up with feathers in my mouth.”

“Hey!” Jimmy hops up from the sofa, suddenly full of energy. “You know that’s never happened.”

He doesn't choose to respond to that, stepping through into his bedroom, ignoring the way his leg throbs a little. It aches, not quite as badly as it did yesterday, but it still lingers, like something gnawing at the bones there. He digs about in his drawers, looking for something that might fit Jimmy - he’s hardly going to let the guy sleep in his jeans - and tosses it over his shoulder when he finds it.

There’s the sound of something soft impacting flesh and then the muffled sounds of a bird dying. His aim’s still perfect, then.

He only waits for the bathroom door to click shut before he changes out of his own clothes, slipping on the softer pyjamas and tucking himself into bed. He worries at the cuffs of his gloves as he watches the bathroom door, staring at the golden light that outlines it, small streaks of that light slipping further into the dark room.

The door opens, creaking, and the light clicks off a moment later. The bed dips beside him and he turns to face Jimmy. Jimmy stares back at him, face barely visible in the darkness of his room.

“Are you going to stare at me all night?” He asks, breaking the silence between them. Jimmy huffs, but lies down. He’s stiff next to Scott, but relaxes when Scott does nothing but settle a little more comfortably into his bed, drawing the blankets up around his chin.

The leather of his gloves creaks quietly as he tightens his grip, tugging the blankets a little more securely around himself.

Jimmy inhales. “You don't have to wear those for me.” He says.

“I know.” Scott says. Jimmy’s eyes are closed, and Scott could almost believe he was asleep if Jimmy hadn't spoken a moment ago. He has this ability to look at peace, no matter where he is. “I'm not.”

“Alright,” Jimmy says. “I was just letting you know you could take them off. If you wanted to.”

He can hear the ticking of the clock, the sound flooding his room in the silence that follows. He listens to it, swallowing down the first few responses that come to mind.

“Go to sleep Jimmy.”

[senor-plume]

Commedia

I love a good comedy

divine and others

and I know soon I'll end up in one of Dante’s circles (and I can't speak one word of Italian) but which one?

I've flattered a few folks in my day… I've sold people out…a traitor of sorts… I've dived into flesh passion… I've engaged in sodomy…but I am a repentant sodomite! I've been fraudulent on occasion…

and of course…a few others

but is it measured against the fine things I have done in this incarnation of life?

I've raised two boys with kindness, love and patience… I've treated animals with care and the warm hand of love… I've made tea for my ladies when cramps hit them bad…(with golden honey) I've never taken a man’s life away from him… I put a Bon Jovi cassette into a microwave oven and melted that shit down I've never once masturbated to a starlet making millions of dollars…

and so on…

but religion and it's theory's tell you… or force you to believe that the hand of God is all powerful and (help us all) fair…in His eyes

this sentence that I am currently going through makes me reflect upon my somewhat useless life

I've come to the dreadful conclusion that my bad works will out way my good works…

(kind of like Jimmy Carter administration)

so, I am doomed to the entrails of the henchmen of Satan…

to be swallowed once and again… for eternity

and hell, all the beer I drink now just to forget this Earthly pain ain't gonna help me then

nothing will and I guess, now as I stare my demise with every X I make on the calendar there’s really nothing I can do about it

you cant unkill what you already killed you cant unfuck what you've already fucked… ..and so on

and when I think about it deeply I suppose I just want a way to suck up and get a chair on Satan’s board of advisors

kind of like my Dad climbing up in the corporate banking world to make Vice President

unlike him though, I'll have to deal with The Fallen Angles horns poking into my flesh every second

probably better than going on business retreats and certainly better than the cafeteria food

comedy can mold pain and turn it into something humorous

I hope that’s true

I'll know the answer much faster than I ever expected

and if I can I'll try and pass my laughing screams of agony onto you

you'll know I'm around when the faint smell of sulfur reaches you and the clouds take on a jaundice appearance

My Escaped Circle:

The Jaundice Cloud Of Sulfur

…as Living On A Prayer plays on beyond the clouds

with me, yellow and unable to do a fucking thing to stop it

[mrs-march-ahs]

What were the evans like when they were kids?

The Evans When They Were Kids

I had way too much fun writing this. Enjoy :D

----

Tate

­-Total mommy’s boy until he was a teenager and started to hate her (around age 12)

-Until the age of 6, loved going to the zoo and going out places all together as a family

-Would go to the zoo just so he could bat his eyelashes and get a stuffed animal out of it

-And go to McDonalds

-Would bat his eyelashes enough until his parents couldn’t resist but take him to McDonalds

-Would absolutely always fall asleep in the car

-Didn’t mind playing with his siblings cause he didn’t make many friends at school

-Would watch videos on YouTube like “Do You Like Waffles” and “Narwhals”

-The kind of kid to pee* in the sand at a playground

-His mum would apologise if anybody was nearby and then start taking him to a different playground

Kit

Kyle

-Asked a million questions a second (Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? Why do leaves change?)

-And was always desperate to find a good answer

- “Mommy why is that man over there crying?” “I don’t know” “Let’s go ask him!”

-Definitely loved puzzles, loved how things fit into each other and the satisfaction of having it figured out

-Would get annoyed if you wanted to come and help him with a puzzle, because he wanted to solve it himself

-That’s why he became a mechanic, because all the little bolts and screws all together are like a puzzle to him

-I have a feeling his dad or grandfather was a mechanic too so they took him to work occasionally

-He would wear an adult jump suit at like age 9 and his mom would have to roll up his sleeves loads

-Only had one stuffed animal, an elephant, who he slept with way past the age of 12

-Loved to help his mommy bake

-Especially loves breaking eggs and measuring the sugar and flour

-He would sit in front of the oven and solve his puzzle there so he can keep an eye on the cupcakes

Jimmy

-Loooooved trains and cartoons

-Would slide his trains all around the house and if somebody was in the way he would make a ‘choo choo’ to tell them he’s incoming

-If they didn’t move he would hit their ankles

-Super giggly

-Loved cuddles

-If guests came over to their house he would always sit next to them

-I feel like he’d ask to try beer but he’d hate it

-Liked hiding under the table or in a cupboard so that everybody would say “Where’s Kyle?” and he could jump out

-Loved long car journeys so he could stare out the window and watch rain drops race

-Slept with the most stuffed animals, who all had to be arranged in a certain order

-They’d all have names that corresponded

-Jimmy, Billy, Bobby, Tilly, Dolly etc

James

-Definitely the entertainer

-Always loved making people laugh

-A super dancey and giggly boy

-Definitely loved to climb up on things

-Liked to ride his tricycle all around

-The kind of kid to sit and watch bugs move around and pick up worms and put them in his pocket

-He grew up in the circus and was immediately comfortable with everybody, so he would wander around asking people if he could help them

-He’d be so cute that nobody could resist him so grown-ups would give him little jobs to do

-He would ‘send messages’ from person to person just so he could run around and talk to people and have something to do

-I just know he was a super chunky baby

-Loved cookies

-Baby Jimmy wore overalls and stuffed cookies in his pockets I just know it

-One pocket has a cookie the other has a worm

Kai

-Sweet but reserved kid

-Would be a little uncomfortable with strangers

-His father would drag him to church or relative houses and he would bring a little book or a handful of blocks and he would be fine by himself

-But once he did get comfortable with other kids, he would talk loads

-Until kids walked away because they couldn’t get a word in, so he’d be sad and play by himself again

-Eventually grew to enjoy his own company because of this

-Always holding his mommy’s hand

-She would have to encourage him to do things by himself, like go get napkins at a fast food restaurant

-I have a feeling he was a sickly child, which made him lay in bed reading by himself even more

-But not children’s books, he quickly grew niche interests

-Books on Greek mythology and architecture

-Liked toy trains but mostly for the aesthetic

-Never learned how to ride a bike

-His dad tried to teach him how but he gave up, threw his helmet and never spoke of it again

-Loved his pyjamas but never minded dressing up

-He would be made to wear little suits for church and when the family came back and the parents started arguing he would just pat pat pat away to his room and play

-Eventually his mom would come in and say, “Oh Jimmy, darling, why didn’t you take the suit off?” and he’d shrug

-Would hate to have to compete for attention

-Forgotten middle child

-Him and Vince would tell Winter she’s adopted twice a day

-Completely incapable of playing by himself, so if he was bored he would go to Winter to annoy her

-Open her door and just stand in the door way eating a donut until she screamed for mom

- “Tell Kai to get out of my room” “I’m not in your room”

-Eventually Winter gets mad and shuts the door in his face

- “Moooooom Winter shut the door in my face!”

-But he got more and more shy with age

-Liked playing board games but only if everybody listened to him

-Sore loser since day one

-He’d cry so hard he’d throw up on the carpet

- “Mom I throwed up”

-Hated being tickled and would throw straight punches if you dared

-Him and Vince put on puppet shows for Winter if she was sick so she could laugh

-When he was a little older and more shy he would play by himself with action figures

-Set them all up like scenes from Star Wars of Lord Of The Rings and re-enact scenes

-Still did this until 19

-Him playing with action figures would be like:

-(makes gun sounds) (makes explosion sound) (bashes actions figures against each other) (makes gun sounds) (Winter’s barbies that he stole, all run away) (makes girly screams)

--

I wrote play but I meant pee* for Tate

[ramp-it-up]

Cuddle Buddies

Pairing: Roommate! Rafael Casal x Reader

Word Count: 2.4k

Warnings: Minors DNI, RPF, angst, cursing, pining, jealousy, suggestive language, butt slapping, fluff! No smut!  All errors my own. I apologize if you like the smell of patchouli, lol.

A/N: This is an answer to the following ask from @teatro-dira :

Okay so I don't know if this is kinda weird but like an Rafael x reader were they are like really cuddly(like a lot of hugs, cuddling and stuff) friends and roommates and everyone teases them asking them if they're dating. Then Rafael gets a girlfriend which makes y/n lowkey feel betrayed and jealous, but he doesn't realize that. Y/n accidentally ruins their relationship(you chose how). They get into a fight, but it ends in fluff. Hope you understand what I mean:)

Here it goes! I hope you like it!

———-

A series of unfortunate events led you to this situation six months ago.

You were subletting Rafael’s apartment in Santa Monica when production wrapped a month early on his project in Vancouver. He had nowhere to go, and neither did you, so you agreed to share the space.

You vibed, almost as much as he and Daveed did. Folks began to call you the fourth Muskateer, for as much as you, Rafa, Daveed and his girl were always together. 

You all talked, smoked, and created together. You and Rafa especially were always all over each other, keeping each other warm under blankets on the couch, watching movies while you ran your fingers through his hair, in one or another’s bed watching videos, or writing in tandem. 

It was all good, cause Rafa was being a man-whore at the moment with several ladies, and you were just chilling. It was dope. 

Almost.

It would have been all the way dope, except...

Except for the fact that you were in love with Rafa.

You loved sharing the same space with him, because you could smell him when he just got out of the shower, play in his silky hair, and feel his strong arms around you. And when he wore grey sweats…. Damn.  You and your little bullet celebrated every time that happened.

Everyone could tell, except for Rafael.  People ragged on you two so hard, that you vehemently denied it every time, to the point of getting heated.

One night, you side eyed the teaser through a cloud of smoke after catching Rafa’s grimace when they said you two should get together.  Your mood sank at what you perceived was rejection.

“I would NEVER get with Rafa, that’s the homie.  He’s like a brother to me. Ugh. Getting with my brother? No way. We’re just Cuddle Buddies.”

Rafa blinked and then took a toke.

“Exactly, we the homies. Platonic Ride or Dies.  It’ll never happen.”  He passed what he was holding and then stood up. “Cuddle Buddies till the end.”  He sounded disgusted.

“I’m going to go get some food. I’m hungry. What does everyone want?”  After everyone yelled out their orders, you offered to come with.

“Nah, sis.  I’m good.  Gonna clear my head. I’ll be back soon.  Rafa peaced out and you sat back down with the crew.

-------

Ever since that night, Rafa seemed a little distant.  He was always busy, and never had time to sit and kick it with you the last couple of weeks.  You all never seemed to link.

One night, he was home when you came in with groceries.

“Oh shit, I didn’t know that you’d be here!” You put the groceries down on the counter while Rafa was at the stove, cooking up some pasta with marina.

“Mmmmmm. Smells good!” You went and stood very close to him, expecting him to give you a side hug, at least.

He just turned and glanced at you, a smirk lifting one side of his face.

“Will you never learn to keep an umbrella in the car? You always come in soaking wet from the rain.”

Here he was, shaking his head that you didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.  How could this talented genius ever want to be with you?

You just played it off, as usual. “I’m starving. I didn’t think I would make it through cooking, but you’re always clutch, Rafa!” 

Rafa stood there and gaped at you.

“Uhhhhh… I thought you said you were driving down to the Vista to see your mom… I have someone coming over for dinner....”

“No.  She’s decided to go on a cruise to Cabo with her bestie… she just called and told me as she was boarding the ship this afternoon.  The hussy. Tryna be fast with her little friends.”  You laughed.

“So, who’s coming over?  UTK? Wayne? Jimmy?”

You jumped up on the counter and watched as Rafa put some french bread with butter and garlic in the oven.  Smelled like heaven.  Those guys would definitely invite you to stay.

Rafa wiped his hands on the towel that was hanging on the stove. And turned around to face you.

“Her name is Aurora.”

It was like he’d punched you in the gut. He’d NEVER brought one of his heauxes around. You fought the urge to double over, even though you felt nauseous.  When you looked at him, he looked concerned.

“Hey, you okay?”

You jumped down from the counter and quickly nodded your head, laughing weakly.  

“I...uh.. Yeah.  Like I said, I haven’t eaten since breakfast, expecting to be at dinner with my moms by now.”

You grabbed your groceries, putting them up quickly and grabbed an apple, taking it to your room.

“I’m going to get out of your way in a minute, I’ll go over to Carla’s and hang with her tonight. We’ll probably go out and do what we do, you know?”

Rafa still looked worried.

“Are you sure you’re ok? You need more than an apple. Look, stay…”

“NO!”  Your voice was raised and it startled you.  “I mean, I’m not one to be a cock blocker.  I’ll just get my stuff and get ready to go.”

Rafa just watched as you scurried into your room. Why did you feel like crying?  Why did you feel as if you would never breathe properly again?  You got out your phone and called Carla.

20 minutes later, you exited your room dressed for the club with your overnight bag.  There was a strange smell in the room, and it wasn’t pasta.  It was patchouli.  You HATED patchouli.

You didn’t realize you were giving the gas face until Rafa came out of the kitchen followed by a short, but cute woman, with a body like, whoa. 

Of course.

Rafa glared at you and you fixed your face.  That bestie telepathy was on point. Then he looked up and down, as if he were judging your freakum dress.  Well, fuck him.

“Oh, hey!  Y/N, this is Aurora.  Aurora, Y/N.”

Aurora ignored your outstretched hand and went in for a hug. 

“Y/N!  I’ve heard so much about you that I feel like I know you intimately, just like Rafael.”  

You tried to keep your face straight in reaction to her scent, then gave her a sideye. 

Was it the inept way she rolled the ‘R’ in Rafael, or the thinly veiled shot at your relationship? Either way, you felt like slapping the shit out of her. You looked at Rafa, but then just cleared your throat.

“And I’ve heard so much about you as well.  You’re all Rafa talks about.” He shook his head behind her.  “Nice to meet you, but I’m headed out for the night.”

It was then that Aurora saw your bag and brightened up.  

“Oh!  You do look nice. Are you leaving, you sure you don’t want to stay?”  

You could smell insincerity a mile away. Even patchouli couldn’t cover that up. You just smiled at her.  

“No ma’am.  I’ve got places to see and people to do.”  You winked at them as you walked out of the door, holding up your umbrella.  “Stay dry y’all.”

You made it out the door without crying of jack slapping that little bitch or Rafa.  You were winning.  

But why did it feel like you’d lost everything?

-----

You and Rafa successfully avoided one another for days.  He was either over Aurora’s or you were with Carla, your mom, or just stayed in your room.

One time you passed Rafa and Aurora on the couch watching a movie on your way to the kitchen to get something to eat.  Rafa’s head was in her lap.

You stopped dead in your tracks when you heard Rafa’s slightly raised voice say: “Don't’ mess with the swoop, Babe.”

‘Babe.’ He called her Babe. That’s it. It was time for you to go. 

You were cramping Rafa’s style.  You just tiptoed back in your room, making little to no noise so that they could watch the movie in peace. You didn’t see Rafa looking at your door after you went in.

----

A week later, you let Rafa know your move out date.

“Wait. What?”

Rafa’s mouth was open. You repeated yourself.

“Well, I’m going to move in with Carla. She’s going to let me ride her couch until this other place comes open in three weeks. It’s a sweet deal, near the studio….”

Rafa’s mind was racing, you could see the gears turning.

“Well… why don’t you just stay here until then, we got a good thing going.” He looked upset. What was up with him?

“Rafa… I’m just in the way.  You’ve got Aurora…”

“Hold up, wait.  We aren’t even that serious.  I mean, I just stopped seeing Bev and Chrissy. He looked at his watch. Last week.”

You laughed at Rafa’s fuckboi ways.  “Well, what about me? I might want to date someone and bring them over…”

Rafa’s face changed.

“Bring someone over here…”

But it didn’t sound like an invitation, it sounded like a threat.  

It was your turn to stare at Rafa.  “What the hell…?”

He straightened up.  “I mean, any of your guests are welcome here.”

You sighed and shook your head. 

“See what I mean? Things are getting tense, I want us to stay friends, not be tight with each other all the time.”

Rafa grinned.  “You said ‘tight.’”  He dodged a couch pillow thrown at his head.

“What are you, a 12 year old?”  You were rolling.  He really was one of your best friends.  But you needed space to get over yourself.  And him.

“Okay.  You grown.  But just know that you don’t have to go.  And know that I will miss the hell out of you.”  

Rafa came over to hug you, and he held you longer than normal, and then kissed the top of your head.  You looked up at him, still in his arms and it was like…

You cleared your throat.  “Well, I guess I better go start to pack.”

Rafa stepped back.  “Ok.”

Both of you hurried to your perspective rooms.

-----

One night, a couple of days later, Rafael came into your room without knocking.

“What did you say to Aurora?”

You were laying on your stomach on your phone, in just your t-shirt an panties.  You rolled over and looked at him. 

“What are you talking about?”

Rafa wasn’t yelling, but he was keyed up.

“What did you tell her the last time you talked?”

You put your head down to think, then brought it back up. 

“I just said that I was going to miss playing in your hair when we watched movies, that I knew it was your favorite thing.”

Rafa nodded, then shook his head.  

“Y/N, you’re the only one I let touch my hair.  Aurora has barely been allowed near it.”

“That’s…. New.”  You were perplexed.

“No it isn’t. Everyone knows I don’t like people messing with my hair.  Aurora accused me of having feelings for you.”

You were sitting up now, crossing your arms and standing before Rafa.

“That’s ridiculous.”

Rafa looked like he was about to explode. He threw his hands up in the air and walked out of your room.

“OF COURSE IT IS! RIDICULOUS!”  He was really agitated.

“Yeah, I know all too well that you think it's ridiculous for me to want to be with you.  I don’t know what makes you think I’m not good enough for you?”

“Good enough for ME?  You’re the one running around with all the model/actress types, you’re the one who thinks I’m beneath you.  You said so that one night when you said we were ‘Platonic Ride or Dies.’”

“Here we go! Total distortion! Did you hear what you said before I said that?  You said I was like your brother.  Your brother.  You think it’s that disgusting to be with me.”

“I just said that because you made a face when what’s her face said we should be together.”

“I made that face because I was imagining fucking your brains out.  It was probably my cum face.”

You stopped and stared at him, mouth hinged open.

“The fuck?”  You burst out laughing.  “You are mad outta pocket Rafa.” Rafa was rolling too.  “But you ain’t gotta lie.”

Rafa stopped laughing.  

“Why do you think I’m lying?”

He was moving closer to you. This felt… dangerous. He looked up and down your body, and it was the first time you felt uncomfortable being comfortable around Rafa.

“Because you told me that you wanted to just be Cuddle Buddies a month after you came back from Canada. You drew a line in the sand.”

Rafa shook his head at you and smiled, green-blue eyes twinkling. 

“I knew you were too zooted.  I shouldn’t have tried to shoot my shot.”

“Run that back for me?”  You couldn’t believe what he was saying right now.

“What I said was..I wanted to be Cuddie buddies. Cuddie is… you know…”  

He pointed to your crotch.

You looked down, and then up at him again. “I can’t with you Rafa….” 

Rafa tilted his head in that sexy way at you. 

“Can you really not?” 

You were stunned.  Rafa continued.

“But I’m serious. When you came back with ‘Cuddle Buddies,�� I thought you were blowing me off and just wanted to be friends. So, I just settled into the friend zone.”

“Do you mean you’re attracted to me? Rafa, that’s funny as hell. You want me for my body?”

Rafa raised his eyebrows at you. “Hell yeah. C’mon girl. You know you’re fine.” 

Your cheeks heated up. You stared at him for what must have been a solid minute.  The possibilities of this alternate reality where Rafa liked you like you liked him opened up.

“But, Rafa... I don’t wanna be just cuddie buddies.”

“Oh. Ok, Cool….” Rafa cleared his throat and looked everywhere but at you.

“I want your heart.” 

Rafa paused when he heard that and his face fell as he moved toward you.  He took your arms in his hands.

“Y/N I'm sorry, I can't give you my heart.”

It was your turn to pick up your face.

“’Cause you already have it.” 

His mischievous grin made your stomach flip.  But you were mad.

“Fuck you, Rafa.” You were laughing with happiness, despite him playing too much.

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me twice.” Rafa swooped down and threw you over his shoulder. “I’ve been waiting six months for that invitation.”  

You were trying to kick and scream. 

Raa swatted you on the ass, then smoothed his hand over the cheek that stung.

“The more you struggle, the more you’ll be begging me to stop in a few.”

You struggled some more, but he made it to your bedroom and deposited you on the bed.  He glared down at you, all sexy green-eyed god.

“Try me, Y/N.”

You reached for the drawstring on his sweats.

“If you insist, Rafael.”

-----

Taglist:

@braidedchallah @theatrenerd86 @sebastianabucknettastan @imatyoursurrvicesurr @riiyy @lonelydance @jbrizzywrites @honeysucklechocolatedrippin @anh1020 @sillyteecup @ohsoverykeri @theselilwonders @biafbunny @summerofsnowflakes @honeysucklechocolatedrippin @wreakhavoconmacroissantdiggs @janthonybitch @curlyhairclub

[harryspet]

plaything | sebastian stan

[Warnings] dark sebastian stan x reader, dark chris evans x reader, lots of dub con bordering on non con, spanking (aftercare?), dub con sex/oral sex, humiliation, seb wants you to call him daddy, impregnation, over/stimulation, abusive relationship, seb domesticating reader, manipulation, seb being a jerk and chris being creepy

A/N: This is for @sherrybaby14​ ‘s Prompt Challenge! If you’re not already following her, please do! The original prompt was “ Bucky fic where the relationship is already well known to be dark. Maybe he views her as a plaything and likes to do things that set her up for failure so that he can punish her. Maybe some gas/lighting too”. I’ve been watching a lot of Sebastian interviews lately so this fic was inspired by that. I know both Sebastian and Chris a super nice guys in real life but I had a lot of fun imagining them as bad guys! 

In which you can’t seem to escape Sebastian’s punishments.

Please like, reblog and let me know what you think!

word count: 3.1k

You watched Sebastian on the TV in your kitchen, licking a spoon covered in fudge batter. He was being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel and he was as captivating as ever. You chuckled a bit as he made a joke and the crowd erupted in laughter. 

“Y/N, it’s not lady-like to lick the spoon,” Delilah, Sebastian’s chef, said to you. You were in the middle of yet another cooking lesson. You just could never get your food tasting the way Seb liked, “At this rate, I don’t think I’ll be getting fired anytime soon.”

The dessert was in the oven and now the older woman was placing the finishing garnishes on their steak, “He likes his steak medium-well, remember that,” Delilah went on but you couldn’t concentrate. 

You know you should’ve paid attention but you knew deep down you’d never be a good cook. At least, not in the way Seb wanted you to be, “You don’t think he’ll notice it’s microwaved?” You asked Delilah who had previously agreed to your scamming. You’d pretend that you made what she had. 

“He shouldn’t notice because my food is delicious either way. But, it may taste a little different and you can blame that on the fact that you made it,” You nodded nervously. 

“Thank you, Delilah,” The older woman only smiled as she began to gather her things. Everything was laid out and now you could put everything in Tupperware and microwave it tomorrow before Seb arrived. 

You put your oven mitts on and walked over to the oven. You lifted the pan of brownies out of the oven and set it on the stove. The interview on the TV was ending now and you watched as Jimmy told the audience the opening date for Seb’s new movie. 

Seb hadn’t been back to your million dollar apartment in two weeks because he was doing press all day and night.

You almost didn’t hear Delilah say from the foyer, “Mr. Stan, you’re home early,” Your heart dropped. 

“Delilah,” You were sure they were hugging now, “I thought I wouldn’t be seeing you for a while. You look as beautiful as ever.”

You quickly put away all the spices and cutting boards, just throwing them in a random cabinet. And then the plates of food … you stacked them and threw them into the garbage can. You panicked, he couldn’t know that Delilah had made the food after you promised you’d do better. 

“Well … I- oh look, my husband is calling me,” Delilah rushed out, “Have a good evening, Mr. Stan!”

When Sebastian entered the kitchen, you were smiling wide, a dash of flour on your cheek and apron that you had just put there, “I thought you were going to be in L.A. for the rest of the night,” You said to him, kissing his cheek as he approached you. He didn’t return the affection, his eyes tired from his flight. He was wearing a plain black t-shirt and a pair of grey sweatpants, “I just watched you on TV … you did great.”

“I finished up earlier than I thought. I wanted to see you,” He looked down at you, his eyes burning holes into you. He knew something was up. 

“You look exhausted but I know what will wake you up. Your favorite midnight brownies! Because, you know, we usually eat them at midnight-” He took one look at the brownies and turned back to you.

“Why was Delilah here?” He interrupted, reaching a hand to wipe away the flour on your cheek.

Your smile fell, “S-She came to give me the recipe for the brownies,” He didn’t believe it and you bit down nervously on your bottom lip nervously, “I asked Delilah to make dinner and I was gonna pretend that I had made it myself.”

Seb sighed, a smirk tugging at his lips, “And where’s dinner now?”

You pointed towards the trash can, “And you wasted the food too?”

“I panicked,” You tried to explain yourself, “But I’m gonna make dinner for real tomorrow. I watched Delilah do everything so-”

You yelped as he suddenly grabbed the back of your neck and pulled you closer to him. His breath fanned over your face and then he leaned down to your ear, “You haven’t cleaned either, there’s dust on the painting in the foyer.”

“I-I was going to do it tomorrow before you got home,” You whispered, your heart pounding. 

“Do I ask for too much, Y/N? I’m not sure why you like frustrating me.”

“I-I don’t like frustrating you, Seb.”

“You do,” He insisted, “Why else would you throw schemes like this together?”

“I-” He shushed you and you swallowed your words. The look in his eyes was crazy and you weren’t sure what kind of beast you had awoken this time. You tried to remember a time when things weren’t like this. When he chased you and you thought you might be more than his plaything. 

+

You met Sebastian at one of his interviews. Of course, you didn’t expect him to spare you a second glance because he was the celebrity and you were the girl running to get everyone's coffee. You were practically an assistant to the assistants. You only did the job because it paid slightly more than minimum wage and you were late on your rent. 

You carried three different trays of coffee into the dressing room. It was a smaller production company then he was probably used to. There were at least three other Avengers in the room getting their makeup touched up. You handed the coffees to each of their assistants and then to your boss. 

You would’ve walked away but you saw him take a sip, his eyes still narrowed on you, “This is four sugars …” 

“Yes,” You said quickly, looking over the receipt. Your face visibly fell as you read it, “Well, it’s three but I can find you some sugar, sir. It’ll only take a moment.”

“You can’t seem to get anything right on the first try, can you? I order this drink a million times a week. The other coffee girls can get it right. Why can’t you?”

You took a deep breath, “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.”

“You’re right because you’re-” You closed your eyes and waited for him to say you were fired. A tall figure emerged behind you and you slowly opened your eyes. 

“I’m sure one sugar isn’t the end of the world, sir,” Seb had said, a hand pressed to your lower back, “If you’re going to treat your staff so poorly, in front of everyone I have to had, then maybe Marvel shouldn’t be giving you their business.”

Your boss was practically jumping out of his skin, “I-I apologize, Mr. Stan,” 

As your boss scurried off like a mouse, he stepped in front of you, “I’m Sebastian.”

+

“I work such long hours, I have to fly around the world, but I take care of you, don’t I?” You nodded vigorously, “I just … don’t like to be lied to. You know what this means, don’t you, pet?”

Pet.

He loved to call you that when his temper got the best of him. Yes, of course, you knew, “Sebastian, not tonight, please-” 

He forced you to look into his eyes, “But I know you like it, Y/N,” With his other hand he gripped your waist, pulling up your skirt. You never seemed to avoid it. There was always something you did wrong that led to this. 

He pressed his lips to yours and you were surprised how gentle he was. Your lips moved in sync with each other as he pressed you against the kitchen island. He was untying your apron and it fell to the ground. Then he was reaching into your panties, easily finding how wet you were, “That’s my girl,” He smirked against your lips, starting to rub circles over your sensitive bulb. 

You ground against his fingers, wanting more friction between you. He kissed the side of your mouth, then your chin and down to your neck, “Ah,” you moaned as he played you like a piano, a song that he had spent the last year memorizing, “Seb, Seb …” 

“Call me Daddy,” He demanded and you moaned as you neared your climax. 

“Oh my god, Daddy,” You were about to tilt your head back when he suddenly removed his fingers. Not in a teasing way and your eyes widened you realized he wasn’t in a playing mood. He grabbed your hips roughly and turned you around. He pressed on your back until your chest was against the marble, “Only good girls get to cum, Y/N,” You felt him walk away and you didn’t dare look back at him, You heard a drawer open and slam shut. 

He lifted your skirt and as he pulled down your underwear, you closed your eyes shut. The impact didn’t come as you expected. You thought it stung much more than when he used his hand. You whimpered, your hands balled into a fist, “You remember what to say, don’t you, pet? I’m giving you twenty and I’m sure you don’t want any extra.”

“Thank you, Daddy!” 

He’d rub a circle and then hit your bottom with the wooden spoon again. You thanked him for each one. As the spanks increased, you squirmed around and Sebastian decided to pin your arms behind your back to hold you in place. 

When he was done, tears were streaming down your face, “Good girl, Y/N. Very good,” Sebastian let go of your wrist, gently helping you up before lifting you into his arms. You wrapped your arms around his neck as he carried you out of the kitchen. 

You cried as he set you on the bed you shared and as he rubbed aloe vera over your bruises. Sebastian held you, placing a kiss on your forehead, as you cried yourself to sleep.

+

You thought your punishment was over but as you exited the shower the next morning, you found a surprise waiting for you on the bed. A “surprise” was probably the wrong word to use. You picked up the pair of black stilettos and set them by your feet before picking up the note. 

Wear this. No panties. Finish cleaning the house and then come meet me in my office. My bookshelves need dusting. - Your one and only love, Sebastian

You balled up the note, tossing it to the side, as you took a deep breath. You decided that he wasn’t going to break you down this time. You dressed in the black, satin, mini dress and your mouth dropped open as you realized it ended an inch after your bottom. The top was basically a corset that pushes your chest up and the clear straps that held them up were flimsy. A matching white apron accompanied everything but even that seemed to be mini-sized. You could barely get on the heels without your whole bottom showing. 

You gritted your teeth, pacing the room, as you tried to get used to the heels. You reminded yourself again that you’d do this with a smile on your face. You pulled your hair back with a tie and left the master bedroom. 

You cleaned almost the entire house with those heels on. Your feet ached and every random draft of wind sent you shivering. If you moved in a certain way, you could feel the satin rubbing against the bruises on your bottom, a reminder of the punishment you suffered the day before. 

You wiped a drop of sweat from your forehead as you finished wiping down the kitchen counters. After you carried the duster to Seb’s office and as you knocked you heard, “Come in, pet,” And you spotted Seb leaning against the front of his desk. 

His eyes were dark and as you met Captain America’s blue-green eyes, your heart dropped to your stomach, “Seb-”

“You know Chris, right, Y/N? You met at that wedding a few months ago?” Sebastian asked, gesturing over the muscular man perched on Seb’s leather couch. 

You remained silent, not wanting to meet the other man’s eyes. You shifted uncomfortably in your dress, pulling at the sides, “Y/N looked very different then … but I have to say that I prefer this look much more,” You could feel his eyes taking in your body. 

You had promised yourself you’d get through this unscathed but you hadn’t planned for this. You wanted to die of embarrassment and it was only as Seb said, “Don’t mind us, pet. We’re just talking business. You have a job to do.”

Your mouth was dry and you felt frozen, “Sebastian, please-”

You cut yourself off because the glare he gave you was deadly. It took you a moment to get the courage to take a step. Your heels clicked against the hardwood floor as you paced over the tall bookshelves that were placed opposite the couch Chris Evans was sitting on. 

You began to dust his collection of books and you cursed the fact that man loved reading about space so much.

Both of their eyes were raked in your body. They muttered a few sentences talking about some director but you knew they were just trying to fill the air. Their focus was you and only you. 

You reached the lower levels but as you had to reach the top one, your dress rode up. You quickly pulled it down but it happened a few more times, “I don’t think you’ll do a very good job if you’re pulling at your dress the whole time, pet,” You almost shot an accusing glance towards him. 

Instead, you stopped holding onto your dress before politely saying, “I don’t think I’m tall enough to reach the top shelves,” You spoke through gritted teeth. 

Seb glared at you sharply but Chris only smirked, “You might’ve hit the lottery with this one, Stan.”

In any other context, you might’ve appreciated the compliment. 

“The coffee table is a little dusty too,” Sebastian lied and you tried to scowl. You walked over to the coffee table, bending down to dust the table. You were close to Chris now and you saw him lean forward, elbows resting on his knees. 

“Look at me, Y/N,” Chris had told you and you did, keeping eye contact as you dusted all the knick-knacks that Seb kept on the coffee table. Yours were on him but he was trailing down to your chest. You guessed he had seen enough of your bottom while you were dusting. 

You stood up straight then looked at Seb, “Did he tell you to stop looking at him?” And you winced as you turned your head back to Chris. 

Seb moved behind you but you couldn’t take your eyes off of Chris. Seb pressed himself against your back, lifted up the skirt of your mini dress. He roughly stuck his fingers between your fold and his fingers were wet as he pulled them away. How? How could that happen when you felt sick with embarrassment. 

Your face was probably bright red by that point, “And I thought you couldn’t upset me further. Now you’re getting turned on by another man. Right in front of me, I should add.”

“S-Seb I-I-” He grabbed you by the front of your neck, pulling you further into him, “I-I’m not, I promise!”

“Don’t lie to me, Y/N. You love the attention. Does Daddy not give you enough?” He spoke huskily into your ear, “Now you have to show Daddy’s friend who you belong to. Bend over, hands on the table.”

As you bent over, you couldn’t help but wonder how things had become so drastically different. You placed your hands flat on the table and it wasn’t long before you heard Sebastian’s belt come off. You thought he might spank you at first but you felt the hard tip of his length press against your entrance. 

He grabbed your hair, forcing you to tilt your head up and look at Chris. He was leaning back now, his hand over his crotch. You could see the hard on beginning to form underneath his jeans, “Only Daddy gets this hole, understand?” And before you could answer, he entered you all the way. 

You gasped, unable to find the words as you screamed out. “Right, pet?” He slammed into you deeply.

You nodded, “Y-Yes, Daddy. Only you.” Seb pounded into you, animalistic growls in his throat as you squeezed around him. 

Soon, you had both fallen to your knees but he only went harder, “Seb, Seb!” You moaned his name, already nearing your climax. The angle you were at let him hit your most sensitive area with every thrust. And as he bent over your body, his fingers rubbing your sensitive bulb, it wasn’t long before that wave of pleasure ripped through you. 

Your body shook and you tried to run away from the full force of it, Sebastian pulled you back onto him. He wasn’t done yet. Chris had pulled his hard member from his jeans and was stroking it as he watched you react to the over/stimulation. Seb had even pulled down your dress so your breasts were fully out. 

Seb didn’t let up on stroking you and, as your second climax came, you thought you might fall apart. “You like it when he watches, don’t you?” Seb groaned in your ear, “You want him to see me put a baby in you.” Seb’s stroke slowed but they were still deep as his song neared its crescendo. 

Seb knew that you were in the middle of switching your birth control methods. 

“Beg me to put a baby into you,” He said, pulling your hair tighter. 

“Ah,” you moaned, “Please give me a baby, Daddy! Please!”

With that, Seb’s hips tightened as he released into you. You felt the warmth deep inside you and you were still shaking as he pulled out, “Good girl,” He said, out of breath. 

You looked at Chris who was thrusting into his own hand. Seb smacked your bottom loudly, “Finish him off, Y/N,” You turned to Seb with wide eyes. As if he hadn’t humiliated you enough. He hit your bottom again, “Now.”

You hesitated before crawling around the table. You felt your own fluids and Seb’s running down your leg. You perched yourself between the older man’s legs and he responded by grabbing your face, pulling you up to his member. 

You closed your eyes as you took him into your mouth. Chris groaned, leaning back as you took him in deeper. You remembered how Seb liked it. Whatever your mouth couldn’t cover, you used hand, twisting around his length, “That’s it, such a good girl,” You gagged as you took him in further. Sebastian loved when you gagged and now you knew Chris did too. As Chris finished, he forced your head down, and you thought you might run out of air as he released into your throat. 

You fell back, gasping after you were forced to swallow it all, “I think I’m going to come to New York more often,” Chris gave you a tired smile.  

You looked to Sebastian who was already up, buttoning his slacks, “Straighten yourself up, Y/N, don’t be rude to our guest.”

+

Hope you enjoyed! Check out my dark peter parker fics and my new Bucky fic called Obedience!

[olivesnook33]

More Than What I’ve Already Become (Supercorp Waitress AU)

I’ve had a Supercorp Waitress Au (both the movie and musical) rolling around in my head for a while that has, quite frankly, prevented me from writing anything else. So I finally sat down and wrote out a little of it and figure I’ll just post it here as I write it in spurts. If it ends up any good I’ll move it over to ao3 when it’s done. So for now please enjoy Part 1

The gentle hum from the fluorescent light that hung low in the small back room lulled Kara into a sense of quiet comfort as she worked. The early morning hours when she had the diner to herself were the only true solace in her days. Sugar, butter, flour. A pinch of salt. Ice cold water. Dextrous and lightning quick fingers bringing the pastry together. Her mind on autopilot as she wrapped each new crust in plastic wrap and placed them in the fridge while grabbing those she had made the previous morning to be rolled out and baked.

She glanced up to make sure the oven was on, as if it was ever turned off, and set about working the dough as little as possible. Quick and gentle movements so as not to overwork it. Buttery and flaky is what J’onn’s Pie Shop was known for; not tough and chewy. Apple, cherry, rhubarb, chocolate banana, chess, coconut cream, and the day’s special.

As she crafted the last pie, she couldn’t fight the memory of learning her craft. It was like she had walked back into the tiny kitchen of the small home she grew up in. Firm, but gentle hands guiding her own as she measured each ingredient and stirred the marshmallow into the steaming pudding mix her mother made. The soft humming of the song they had made up together through the years.

The memory always brought her peace. Made her feel as though her mother was there; wrapping her in her arms so she was safe and warm. Twirling her around the kitchen as she impatiently waited for the sweet, sweet treat they created together.

“Kara.”

The voice snapped her out of her memories and back into the dreary present.

“What is it James?”

“No need to get all prissy. What’s the special today? Nia needs to write it on the board.”

“Uhh...deep shit blueberry bacon,” she replied as she pulled the pie from the oven.

James stared at her a moment, “Deep shit?” he asked, his voice incredulous.

“Ah, dish,” Kara corrected herself, “Deep dish, sorry James.”

“C’mon, Kar,” he replied with a shake of his head and turned to head to the counter.

The blonde followed him and grabbed her apron from Alex’s hand as she walked by, “What’s gotten into you today, Kar?” The redhead asked as she tied her own apron, following the blonde behind the counter, accepting the empty coffee pot Kara thrust into her midsection and haphazardly sliding it into place under the coffee maker.

“Make that coff-”

“We got it, Jimmy. We make coffee every day.” Alex said with a roll of her eyes. The sneer that had instantly appeared at the sound of James Olsen’s voice softened once again as she turned her attention to the woman who was staring in the direction of the window but looking at nothing. “Kara…”

The taller woman shook her head. “Later, Alex. We have to open and you know -”

“No. No later. You’ve been in a funk all week and I-I’ve been patient but you’re my little sister. I can’t stand to see you this way. So...Nia! Emergency meeting, now!”

Kara jumped as a clattering of forks and knives sounded from the direction of the booth in the far corner of the restaurant.. “Alex, my ears! I’m right here!”

“Yes, but…” She paused as Nia sat up, blinking sleep from her eyes and looking around in confusion. “Sleeping beauty needed to be roused. Now, c’mon, let’s go.” The redhead

The three women crowded into the tiny restroom. The two other women pushing Kara toward the stall in the corner.

Alex’s voice was firm as she cornered her sister against the sink when she tried to escape. “Kara. You’ve put this off long enough.”

“Alex, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Wh-”

“You know what.” The redhead and Nia replied in unison.

“I thought you said you don’t sleep with your husband anymore.”

“Ah, Nia. I…” Kara let out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t but…”

“But.” Alex interjected, her voice laced with venom as she started to open the package in her hands. She hadn’t liked Mike from the start and couldn’t stand to be in the same room as the man.

“Well, he-he got me drunk and I - I do stupid things when I drink like...sleep with my husband.” She couldn’t temper the self-loathing that crept into her voice when she said that and Alex gave her arm a gentle squeeze as she pressed the dreaded item into her palms with the other.

“You were wearing that red dress, weren’t you?” Her sister said as she steered the blonde toward the stall door.

“Oh, I love that red dress! They way it sparkles, it looks like an ice-skating outfit...” Nia said dreamily from where she sat perched on the edge of the sink.

Alex shoved Kara into the stall and pulled the door closed, keeping her hand on the door, holding it in place as though her freakishly strong sister couldn’t easily pull the rickety door off its hinges if she wanted to.

“Stay with us, Nia! Read the directions.”

“Alex!” Kara screeched from where she was precariously squatting in the cramped stall. She knew that every drop of blood in her body had rushed to her face, her embarrassment for this whole ordeal quadrupling. “I don’t need her to read the direct-”

“Se puede saber la duratión de la -”

“English!”

“Right, sorry Alex. I hope you drank enough this morning, Kara.” The young woman cleared her throat. “Do not insert the test stick into your vag-”

“Thank you, Nia! But I’m all set.” Kara all but yelled as the sound of the toilet flushing filled the small room and Kara yanked the door out of her sister’s hand.

She carried the stick pinched between two fingers, a slight crinkle in her brow. Nia jumped down from the counter as the blonde approached, skirting around her and looking at the object in her hand as if it were a bomb. Kara could have sworn she heard the young brunette chanting negative under her breath as she passed by.

“Okay, how long?” Kara asked, setting the stick on the edge of the sink then washing her hands.

Nia glanced at the instructions that were still in her hand, “Two minutes. One line is negative and two means positive.”

She heard Alex twisting the timer she had surreptitiously removed from the kitchen on their way to Kara’s personal hell that was this bathroom. Turning off the water, she dried her hands and sighed.

Nia smiled at her tentatively. “Maybe...maybe his uh, his machinery is broken somehow. What if! What if his boys don’t swim? I mean...that would be miraculous luck.”

“Yeah, real miraculous.” Alex grunted. “Thought you’d get away with an unprotected fu-”

“Funny how one night can ruin your whole life.” Kara interjected with a mirthless chuckle. She had never grown used to the way her sister used colorful vocabulary so flippantly. Alex glared at her.

The redhead scoffed. “Don’t say that, we don’t even know what the test says.”

“I just wish...someone would send me a sign, tell me ho-”

The timer started to ring and three pairs of eyes immediately darted to the plastic stick sitting on the counter.

Kara drew in a shuddering breath, Alex’s hand encircling her wrist for a moment, giving her a supportive squeeze then giving her a tiny push in the direction of the sink.

One line. One line. One line. One line.

It was like a mantra that played over and over in her head as she crossed the short distance in a few short steps. She closed her eyes before picking up the stick that held the power to make or break her. Taking one last deep breath in, she opened her eyes.

“Shit.”

[grace-likes-things]

Chapter Seven - Something Different

Masterlist

A/N: uhhhh oops it’s been a long time. What with the world going to shit, I hope you can understand my struggle. Good news is I have the next 2 chapters written! This story is still going to be quite the ride so I hope you can stick it out with me, I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Warnings: burns

~~~~~~~

My sock-clad feet are digging into the soft carpet of Peter’s bedroom, my biology notebook across my lap, and a textbook strewn on the ground. Music plays softly to occupy the quiet of the room. We’ve just finished our second day back at school since the Sarah incident, and things are a little strange. Kids have all of a sudden been acting out of the ordinary, some small things — Jimmy S. dumped his lunch on the floor before laughing and walking out the door mid-day — and some more concerning — Hannah O. shook the climbing rope in gym until the kid on it lost his grip. The staff has been seriously concerned, and I think the school board is meeting to discuss what might be going on. 

“Peter?” I ask, lifting my head to the boy taking notes at his desk in front of me.

“Yeah?” He says without looking back.

“Have you gotten any other weird feelings at school? Like before someone acts up?”

“Yeah, but it’s usually minor. It’s probably just a fluke. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s done something villain-worthy.”

I sigh, contemplating the strange events, “I know, but people are still getting hurt, even if it is minor stuff. Do you think it might have something to do with the blip?”

Peter turns in his chair to face me, “What? Like how?”

“Well,” I say, “Sarah, Jimmy and Hannah were all dusted, right? And the other kids, too. They blipped, they’re acting up, but as far as I remember, no one who survived the snap has done anything weird.”

“I guess you’re right, but — what are you doing?”

I give him a confused look, and he’s reflecting it right back, staring at my notebook, “What do you—?”

But when I lower my gaze, I see scrawled pen marks all over my once-neat biology notes. I lift my right hand, and to my surprise there’s black ink smudged all over the side of it. My pen has significantly less ink than it did five minutes ago. The lines on my paper are dug harshly, nearly tearing the pages at some spots.

“Did you mean to do that?” Peter asks, now with his full attention on me, concern littered across his features.

I keep staring at my hand in disbelief, “No,” I mumble, “I didn’t even know I was writing…”

We sit in silence for a moment, trying to process what just happened and all of a sudden a wave of content washes over me, and it’s not a concern anymore.

“It’s fine,” spills from my mouth, “probably nothing.”

“What? Y/N, you just ruined your notes without even realizing— “

“It’s fine, Peter, I don't want to worry about it.”

He looks at me, brows furrowed deeply, but gives in, “Alright…”

“Kids!” 

Both of our heads turn toward the door, and May swings it open to address us, “Want dinner? I failed at lasagna so I’m thinking I’ll just door dash some Italian, who’s in?”

“Sure!” I say, cheery, “I’m up for Italian.”

“Y-yeah, May,” Peter says, not lifting his eyes from my notebook, “Italian sounds good.”

After dinner, once May has tired us out with questions about school, patrol, and lab work, Peter and I settle on top of his comforter to pick a movie to watch, his laptop laid precariously across our thighs. 

“So what are you thinking?” Peter asks, “True crime? Horror? Comedy?”

“Hmm, I don't know, you pick. I’ll probably pass out again.”

He lets out a short laugh, “Alright,” and keeps browsing.

My mind wanders to other things, thinking about my dad picking me up later and home life. And then I realize something, “Peter, I never asked how you were doing after all this. You know, how are you and May adjusting?”

He’s been tired lately, I can tell. He doesn’t act it, not around his friends or at the tower — my dad decided to keep it running while the compound is being rebuilt — but when he thinks no one’s watching he seems exhausted. Maybe calm, but still drained.

He whistles out his next exhale, “I dunno. I guess I haven’t thought about it much. We both blipped, so for us the biggest thing was having to find a new apartment, her new job. But your dad helped, even if May told him not too, so that made it easier.”

“Mhm,” I hum, “And you? I mean, we were both there, on Titan, at the battle. It was…”

“Some scary shit?” 

I laugh, “Yeah, some scary shit.”

Both of our giggles peter out before he says, “Yeah, I mean it’s hard stuff to deal with. It’s not like I’ve gotten over it or anything, but I’m just trying to stay optimistic. We got through it with almost everyone. I still have May, we’ve still got your dad, Pepper, Happy, and you’ve even got a brand new sister, so I’d say things are on the upturn for a while, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I mutter, a small smile on my features. Then I jostle his shoulder, “Knock on wood, though. Can’t be jinxing the only good luck in our lifetimes.”

He taps his knuckles lightly on his bed frame, “For sure, it’s nice not having an Avengers-level threat on the news every month.”

He slides the laptop closer, absently sliding his fingers across the track-pad, but I can tell he’s not really looking at the movie choices. 

“You know you can talk to me though, right?” I glance up at him, heart beating a little faster at the idea of getting a look inside his head, “If anything’s on your mind. If you want to.”

“Yeah,” he turns his head toward me, and now we’re just centimeters away, each breath shared in the same space, “Yeah, thanks. Me, too, you know, if you need to get something off your chest.” But he says it slow, airily, eyes glancing across my face, feature to feature, and I realize I might be doing the same. I nod, and our faces get closer, just the smallest bit, and I find my eyes are focused on his lips.

“Hey, kids!” We hear May call through the apartment and quickly turn our heads toward the door. She’s not in the doorway, thank god.

“Yeah, May?” Peter sighs, settling back against his bed frame.

May now appears in the room, coat in hand, “It's gonna rain tomorrow and I don't wanna walk in it, so I’m gonna grab some groceries before the stores close. Think you can handle taking my bread out of the oven in a bit?”

“You made bread?” Peter says, in a oh-my-god-what-will-I-be-poisoned-with tone. I suppress a laugh for May’s sake.

“Yes, I did, out of the kindness of my heart,” She smirks at him, then turns to leave “The timer’s going off in about 30, you’ll hear it. Thanks!” And then we hear the apartment door close behind her.

“Well,” I sigh, shaking off the awkward demeanor in the room, “Are we even gonna have time to finish a movie at this point?”

He laughs, “Probably not.”

And we both get up to monitor May’s bread experiment, because god knows it’ll burn if we let it bake until her timer goes off. 

“I’m telling you, it’s gotta mean something that I didn’t plummet to the ground when I webbed onto Thor’s hammer —“

“No way!” I laugh at Peter, tossing a dish rag his direction, “You weren’t even directly touching it!”

“But that’s gotta be some indication.” He protests, “Maybe I’m like, partially worthy.”

“How could someone be ‘Partially worthy?’ That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Cap was fighting with it! That means someone other than Thor can be worthy, so—“

“Yeah, but that in no way suggests that partial worthiness is even a thing,” I don't actually doubt him this much, but it’s fun to watch Peter push this idea so much.

“Fine, you know what? We’ll ask Thor if we can test it out next time he’s on Earth. I figure he’ll get drunk enough at the cookout to let us try it.”

“Oooh, you’re gonna try to steal drunk Thor’s hammer?” I laugh, leaning back on the kitchen counter, “That’s risky business, I don't think I want to be involved.”

“Not steal, just borrow for a brief experiment.” Peter tries to reason.

“Okay, fine, but don't come crying to me when a thousand year old god puts you in a headlock,” I turn away from him, checking once again on the sad-looking loaf of bread in the oven, “I think this thing’s probably done.”

“Thor wouldn’t put me in a headlock! I’m the baby of the team, he adores me.”

“First of all, I thought I was the baby of the team, and second, I am totally telling my dad that you took that title—“

“Y/N—“

“Nuh uh, you claimed it! I’m gonna make him give you shit for it—“

“No, Y/N, the—“

And then I feel the searing pain radiating across my entire left palm, down my fingers. A yelp of pain escapes me, and I look down in shock, dropping the bread pan out of my bare hand.

“What the hell?” Peter exclaims quickly as he darts around the counter, shutting the oven door and guiding me quickly to the sink. He turns on the faucet, and cold water starts running over my burned hand, easing the pain only slightly. I stare down in bewilderment at the throbbing red skin.

“What was that?” Peter asks over my shoulder, still holding my wrist to keep my hand below the water, “You weren’t even watching what you were doing!”

“I-I don't know—“ I say, flinching at the discomfort, just as confused as he is, “I didn't even know I was taking it out—”

“What?” He looks down at me now, “What do you mean?” I open my mouth to speak but I don't know what explanation to give him. I don’t remember making the decision to open the oven, I don't remember grabbing the pan.

“Okay,” thankfully, Peter seems to register the disbelief on my face and leaves me at the faucet, returning with the first aid kit from his bathroom, “Let’s get it clean and wrapped.”

I let him guide me to the couch, where he kneels in front of me and sets the first aid kit on the coffee table. I watch from what feels like miles away as he puts ointment on the worst of the burn — my fingertips and the heel of my palm — and gingerly begins to wrap gauze around it. While he’s working on my hand, I’m deep in my scattered thoughts; how did I manage to do that by mistake? Surely I should’ve felt the heat of the oven, should’ve flinched back at the first contact with the metal. I definitely shouldn’t have been able to hold the thing for more than a second without noticing — but I did, didn't I? Or else the burn wouldn’t be so bad. So what the hell happened?

I’m still sitting there trying to figure this out when the door to the apartment opens. We hear two voices enter, not just May’s.

“Hey! Caught your Aunt outside, Pete, thought I’d come up and say hi— what happened?”

My dad and May stop just as they walk through the doorway, just as Peter finishes wrapping my hand.

“Y/N burned her hand taking the bread out of the oven. Uh, sorry, May, it’s kind of ruined all over the kitchen floor.” Peter explains quietly.

My dad walks over and sits beside me on the sofa, taking my wrist gently to examine the injury, “What’d you do, kiddo? Ditch the oven mitt completely?”

“Uh… yeah, I guess,” I say. 

He looks at me quizzically, eyeing the bright red fingertips that weren’t wrapped, “That wasn’t a serious question… you’re kidding, right? This isn’t just a forgot-the-oven-mitt burn. Your fingers are singed.”

“I-I don't know. I didn’t realize what I was doing…” I mumble out.

My dad looks to Peter for answers, but he’s just as lost for words as myself. He gives a shrug and a lost look in response. May rubs his shoulder in a motherly fashion. 

“You okay, sweetie?” She asks.

“Yeah,” I say, looking directly into her concerned eyes, “Yeah I’ll be fine.”

I have a feeling she wasn’t asking about the burns, but I really don't know what other answer to give them. I don't know what happened.

Tony and May look at each other, communicating silently in that parent sort of way that they do, and I just stare down at my hand.

“Okay,” my dad says, “Well, we should probably get you home then. Pete, wanna grab her backpack for me?”

Peter diligently gets up and returns just a minute later with my backpack and sweater, handing it off to my dad, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and I can't muster up anything more than a ‘yeah’ before my dad bids the Parkers goodbye and guides me out of the door.

Before I know it, my dad is opening the passenger door for me and guiding me into the car, and I can’t do anything to shake this trance-like state. It's an unbelievable feeling, having no recollection of making a choice to do something so painful like that. My dad’s voice pulls me out of my thoughts.

“—Earth to Y/N,” he says, waving a hand in front of my face, “Hey, what happened? Are you alright?”

“I- yeah,” I look him in the eye now, “Yeah, I just- I must’ve grabbed the pan without thinking.”

He’s still staring, doubtful, “You sure?” And a beat of silence, “Is everything okay with you and Peter?”

“What?” I ask, “Yeah, everything’s fine, I just— he just helped clean it. I-I don’t know what I did.”

He starts the car, obviously not satisfied with that answer, but pulls away from the curb and begins our route home nonetheless, “Okay, then. Let’s get some sleep into you, huh sweetheart?” His hand comes up to ruffle my hair, and I hum in response. 

The drive home is quiet. 

~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: oooooh what’s goin onnnnnn?

[crystalstar8]

Knights of the Night (Epilogue)

Epilogue

Ch 1, ch 2, ch 3, ch 4, ch 5, ch 6, ch 7, ch 8, ch 9, ch 10, ch 11, ch 12, ch 13, ch 14, ch 15, ch 16, ch 17, ch 18, ch 19, ch 20, ch 21, ch 22, ch 23, epilogue 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139240/chapters/71536491

pairing: Jungkook x oc

genre: vampire au, college au, twilight, romance

word count: 1,587

warnings: blood (obviously), kidnapping, child kidnapping, needles, France, human trafficking

notes: vampires, vampire au, college, college au, so many twilight references, blood, needles, kidnapping, children, homelessness, dance, ballet, flashbacks, romance, slow burn, probably no smut, idk yet tho, France, French things, attempted genocide, inaccurate French history, bisexual main character, @strawberriewithchocolate-blog @mozy-j  @daechwitad-2​ @zobadak​ @fallenstar-7​​​

summary: Catalina starts college in a small town all the way across the country. She doesn’t know anyone and isn’t exactly looking for friends. She just wants to focus on dance. But when she meets fellow dance major, Jimin, and adventurous, fellow freshman, Jungkook, Catalina ends up discovering a whole new side to the small college town; one that is dangerous but oh so enticing...

                 Catalina took one last glance around her room before heading downstairs. She heard Jimin’s voice, which put a wide smile on her face. Him and Taehyung were back on time, which meant they’d be able to come with everyone that afternoon.

               She ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time, before landing in the foyer. Taehyung and Jimin were taking their shoes off and setting their bags down, chatting with Hoseok and Namjoon. Catalina threw her arms around Jimin and asked him, “How was your trip?”

               He pulled away and smiled wide, his eyes disappearing. “It was incredible. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

               “I can���t wait,” Catalina said, smiling just as wide.

               “We were gonna go to the beach later,” said Hoseok. “Do you want to go with us?”

               “Sure! I think we’ll mostly just relax, though,” said Taehyung.

               “Here, I’ll help you unpack so you can get yourselves settled before we go,” Hoseok said, following them back out the car. Catalina left the foyer and went into the kitchen. The kitchen was beautiful, so different from when she first came into this house. They had it remodeled, actually, they had a lot of the house remodeled. Everything was a bit more modern, but their antiques were mostly still around. Even Yoongi redid his bedroom, saying he didn’t want to sleep in a rat’s nest anymore. He made an incredible amount of money on the antiques in that room, the museums practically begging him to part with them.

               The light was on in the kitchen when Catalina entered, which meant Jungkook was in there. Sure enough, he was standing in front of the fridge, staring into its contents with bleary eyes. His hair was a floof on top of his head and his pajamas were rumpled. Catalina came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. She laid her head on his back and listened to the steady rhythm of his heart, something she’s become so very familiar with.

               “What will you have for breakfast?” she asked. He grunted in response, shifting some containers around on the shelf. He finally chose a container of leftovers and cracked the lid to sniff it. He sniffed it three times before deciding it was edible and dumping it on a plate. While it was heating up, he turned and opened his arms, letting Catalina settle into him.

               “Are you gonna surf today?” he asked.

               “You asked me that yesterday,” Catalina said with a giggle.

               “And you said no yesterday!” he said. She could feel his laughter in his chest where her head was resting.

               “Maybe,” she said. “I heard the teaching process is very hands on.”

               He chuckled and said, “Where did you hear that?”

               “Hm, I don’t remember,” she said. The microwave beeped and Jungkook let Catalina go so he could grab his food. She pulled a blood bag out of the fridge and sat down with him at the dining table, sipping at her drink while he ate.

               “What are you guys doing up so early?”

               Yoongi wandered into the kitchen with messy hair and tired eyes.

               “It’s beach day!” Jungkook said, much more awake now that he was eating. “You’re coming, right?”

               “No.”

               “Yoongi, you don’t have to swim or surf or anything,” said Catalina. “You can just sleep on the beach. Or drink wine on the beach. You need the fresh air, you’ve been at your piano for days. Plus, I think everyone would really like to spend some time with you.”

               “When are you going?” he asked.

               “We’re heading out around eleven,” said Catalina.

               “Oh. I’ll think about it,” Yoongi said. “Are Taehyung and Jimin back yet?”

               “Yes, they just walked in a little while ago,” said Catalina.

               “Good,” he said. “I’m glad their flight wasn’t delayed.”

               With that, he left the room.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

               During the drive to the beach, Catalina made sure to sit in the back of the Jeep with Jimin.

               “So, tell me about the trip,” she said, a giddy smile on her face.

               “Ah, it was perfect!” said Jimin. “I’ve never been to Arizona before so I didn’t really know what to expect about the weather or anything. It really is very dry there. The heat is like heat from an oven. And the places we saw were so beautiful. We camped in the Grand Canyon and… it was insane. The Grand Canyon is insane. Everything was so incredible. And at night, you could see the stars perfectly. When we camped in Death Valley, there was absolutely no light pollution for miles so the sky was amazing. We saw the Milky Way.”

               “Oh wow,” Catalina sighed.

               “You and Jungkook should go next summer,” said Jimin. “You’d love it.”

               “Yeah, I would do that,” said Catalina. “That sounds like a lot of fun. We need to make up for our last trip.”

               They sat in silence for a while before Jimin said, “I can’t believe we’re going to France in two weeks.”

               “I know!” said Catalina. “I can’t believe it! This is something I’ve been waiting for my entire life and I’ll finally be able to do it!”

               “Is your solo ready?” Jimin asked.

               “I mean, as ready as it’ll ever be,” said Catalina. “You know how it is.”

Her and Jimin had both taken the winter semester off to recover from their transformations and to get used to their new bodies. Catalina used that time to choreograph a solo worthy of an audition in France. By now, the beginning of summer, she had perfected it as much as she could.

“I’m going to the studio to practice it tomorrow,” said Catalina. “You should come with me. You can help, or just watch. You haven’t seen it finished yet.”

“What time? I’m babysitting tomorrow,” said Jimin.

“Oh right! You’re doing that every Tuesday now, aren’t you?” said Catalina.

Jimin nodded and said, “Yep, Caleb’s sister has dance on Tuesdays, so I’ll just be there for a few hours.”

“Are you still gonna do that when classes start? You’re signing up for classes in the fall, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I don’t want to fall behind any more than I am,” said Jimin.

“Me too,” said Catalina. Then she smiled and grabbed Hoseok’s shoulder over the driver’s seat. “And you’re starting classes with us too, aren’t you?”

He laughed and said, “I sure am!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The weather was perfect, and according to Jungkook, the water was ideal for beginner’s surfing. They got set up on a relatively empty patch of the beach. The family closest to them had a few kids, who were building a sandcastle near the water. It was Monday, so thankfully there weren’t too many other people there. Yoongi laid out a beach blanket and immediately laid down, covering his face with his sun hat. He was almost completely covered, with long sleeves and long pants. Catalina figured he was trying to protect his pasty white skin.

               Jimmy K settled down beside Yoongi with a thick book. Catalina had assumed he would be surfing with them that day; he seemed like the type to surf. Jimin and Taehyung lathered themselves in sunscreen and took their spots near the cooler, relaxing and watching the fun just like they promised. After shedding her shorts and tank top to reveal her new white bikini, Catalina lathered herself in sunscreen, since she could already feel herself burning. Then she grabbed her board and met the others down by the water.

At some point, the family next to them left and they were left to themselves on their private stretch of beach.

Catalina, Namjoon, and Hoseok kept their eyes on Jungkook and Jin, who were teaching them the basics of how to surf. They all had boards, rented ones for the newbies, and Catalina was excited to get out on the water. With every glance at the ocean behind her, she felt nervousness twist in her stomach. She had to keep reminding herself that she wouldn’t drown and she wouldn’t get hurt. Her body was stronger than it used to be, which was something she still hadn’t completely gotten used to.

                They were standing on their boards, Jin showing them how to position their feet. Jungkook went to each of them, giving them pointers or fixing their positions. He stepped onto Catalina’s board behind her and nudged her right foot forward a bit, hands on her bare waist.

               “Just keep your knees bent and your legs spread a bit more,” he said. His bare chest was pressed up against her back.

               “…And if you guys fall off, just let the current roll you until it’s settled, then come up,” Jin was saying. “But you guys won’t drown anyway, so no harm.”

               “Right, no harm,” Jungkook said, his hand sliding down to her butt.

She giggled and turned around to face him.

“Did Hoseok get this treatment when you helped him?” she asked with a wide smile on her face.

“He would probably like that,” Jungkook said with a laugh. “But this is only reserved for my favorite students.”

“Ooh, so Namjoon got this too,” Catalina said, winding her arms over his bare shoulders. He threw his head back and laughed. This was her favorite song. The sounds of his laughter, the waves hitting the beach, The seagulls calling overhead, his heart beating in his chest.

Catalina leaned up to press her lips against his, the board wobbling in the sand beneath their feet.

She never wanted this song to end.

[ashyblondwaves]

All the odd numbers in the safe stay at home asks :)

Hope your night goes well (or at least quickly)!!

your favourite playlist (made by yourself or someone else) Excluding my main playlist there’s this playlist called Retrowave/Outrun that I just love to listen to. It’s electronic music that sounds a lot like it could be from the 80s, sci fi or horror films. I’ve found some bangers on that playlist.

your favourite “grounding” activity (anything that involves using the hands/doesn’t involve “spacing out” or escapism - something like gardening, knitting, dancing, cooking) Playing Tetris. I don’t play nearly as much as I used to, but I can sit there for hours and play and just zone out. 

5 tv shows that cheer you up The Golden Girls, Nature Documentaries, Frasier, Wandavision, Jimmy Kimmel Live

your favourite board game Cranium. I am a BEAST at that game. 

a quote that you would consider getting tattooed or putting in a frame “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot

a tip or hack you’ve learned that makes cleaning or tidying easier Just don’t do it. I’m kidding. Instead of dragging a vacuum up and down stairs, use a squeegee on them. It picks up pet hair and debris and puts it in a nice little pile for you. I did this all the time before we pulled up our carpeting. 

the last so-bad-it’s-good joke you heard It’s not really a joke but we have two Walmarts that are close to us. One is a regular old Walmart and the other is one of the huge super Walmarts. So the other day, my husband called the smaller Walmart “Smallmart” and I wanted to punch him. But it was also kind of funny. 

the last tv episode that made you laugh out loud Oh it’s always The Golden Girls lol. I just had them on for my mom when I got her to bed and had a few laughs over it before I came down to work.

a bath, shower, beauty or toiletry product that makes you feel revived, or that you always re-order when it’s running out Lord of Misrule soap from Lush. It’s my EVERYTHING.

the sport or exercise you enjoy the most, and what’s helped you get better at it Baseball remains my very first love. I haven’t played in ages, but now I take solace in just watching it. 

a youtube video you find useful, entertaining or relaxing There’s this ASMR video that I always put on when I can’t sleep or am feeling bad. It’s from Gibi ASMR and it’s a role play. She’s making you tea and just making you feel comfy and it’s SO insanely comforting to me. So I watch it a lot lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtXbVyaaII4

the book you just finished and what you thought (no spoilers!) I just finished “Growing Things” by Paul Tremblay. It’s a collection of his short stories and I enjoyed them. They were spooky, thought provoking and fun. 

a game you’re playing that takes your mind off things Tetris. Always Tetris.

your favourite flavour and brand of tea There’s this tea by Adagio Teas called “Green Popcorn” and it’s delicious. It tastes like Honey Smacks cereal.

a favourite easy recipe: 5 ingredients or less, or takes less than 30 min to make Ever make little pizzas with wheat thins? Just a dollop of tomato sauce and, a sprinkle of mozzarella cheese and a piece of pepperoni on top and pop them in the oven for about 8 minutes. DELICIOUS. 

[littlemessyjessi]

“Blissfully Blizzard”: Alpha! Steve Rogers Imagine

Steve Rogers Imagine Alpha!Steve Rogers Omegaverse Headcanons/Imagine Alpha!Steve Rogers x Omega!Plus Size Reader Winter Imagine: Stuck in a Blizzard (Yes, I know it's Fall {N. Hemisphere} No, I'm not trying to rush it. Geez.) Enjoy!

Imagine getting stuck in a blizzard with Steve (aka Mother Hen).....

You were trying so hard not to roll your eyes at Steve as you looked out the window of the car into the pure white gusts of snow and icy wind.

Theoretically, Steve being the super soldier he was could've got out and went for help or even pushed the car for that matter- no sweat.

However, there was no way in hell he would leave you here alone.

Not a chance.

"This was supposed to be relaxing." he grumbled.

Clearly he was irritated and you could feel it coming off him in waves.

Normally, as your Alpha that would have your little Omega self dizzy with anxiety ....but you weren't some delicate flower.

You could at least hold your shit together.

As much as popularized Omega culture would like to force everyone to believe that all Omegas were these frail, useless little waifs who can't survive without an Alpha....you didn't buy it.

Never had.

Hell, you hadn't even HAD an Alpha for most of your life until Steve...and you'd only been with him like two years.

Your father bailed after a one night stand turned very real and you're badass Beta mom got shit done.

She raised you to believe in yourself without fail.

She was also in the military and didn't take no for an answer so you now, there's that.

Anyway, you Mr. Soft Blue Eyes over there years ago and he'd been trailing after you like a pup ever since.

Kind of ironic in a way and man, the courtship had been something awful.

You didn't have time for Alphas and he had to do a whole lot of convincing for you to even give him the time of day.

What really sold you was when you realized who he was.

Not that he was Captain America.

In all honesty, you couldn't give a flying fuck about that.

But that he was Steve Rogers- that skinny, stubborn little shit from Brooklyn who never backed down from a fight.

That was what had your attention.

Of course, when he figured out that this was what got your attention....he basically fell in love with you on the spot.

Back to the original point.

He was irritated and you were trying not to let it affect you.

"Well it's kind of relaxing, babe." you offered.  "The snow is pretty and I like the sound of the wind. We've got the heat on.  There's snacks in the back and an extra blanket or two.  And you know I always like being in close quarters with you."

He smiled a bit but gave you a look.

He knew what you were doing ...and he loved you for it.

"You're really trying to make the best out of a sucky situation here aren't you?" he chuckled as he looked down and shook his head.

"Might as well." you said with a shrug before turning around and promptly diving into the back of the SUV.

All he heard was a bunch of noise for a second before a bag was produced in front of his face...yours following it just a second later with a grin.

"Plus we have hot cheetos." you said. "And thanks to ME! We also have all of the leftovers from the fridge this week. Which I conveniently heated up in the oven before we left and kept warm in my handy dandy thermal bag.  And you said it was a waste! Ha!"

A few more seconds of you shoving things around and Steve began to shake his head.

"Are you doing what I think you're doing?" he asked narrowing his eyes at you.

"Shut up." you said pulling the lever and lowering the seats down into the floor.

Silently, you thanked Sam for convincing you to upgrade your vehicle into this fancy schmancy little situtation.

"In the middle of a blizzard?" Steve asked.

"Shut it." you said as you found your beloved blanket....and the six pillows that you'd vacuumed sealed down and then hid under the seats.

Steve died laughing.

"Are you serious?" he was basically choking on his own spit in the front seat.

You turned around and placed your hands on your hips.  

Well as best you could while you were hunched over the back of the vehicle trying to build the perfect nest.

"Listen here, Captain Spandex.  I am an Omega.  You know this.  I know this.  Everyone fucking knows this.  This means that wherever I go, whatever I do....I will bring a certain amount of shit along with me to nest.  It's a fact.  This also means that whilst we're stuck under this damn pavillion in the middle of bumfuck-nowhere-ville with a blizzard around us....I'm going to fucking nest!" you snapped.

Ok, so ...you're emotions and slight worry in the situation had actually began to creep up on you.

It would anyone really.

Hell, even Steve and he was an Alpha.

When he finally caught the scent of it...he bit him bottom lip.

"Hey, babe." he said reaching out and gently touching your elbow.  "Baby, I didn't mean anything by it.  I was just teasing.  I'm actually really happy and grateful.  You being you kind of makes this whole situation a lot better."

You just nodded silently.

That was one thing about being an Omega that really chapped your ass.

As much as you prided yourself on keeping your emotions in check and not needing anyone....sometimes you flew off the handle.

It pissed you off so badly that sometimes you'd spent hours at the shooting rage just blasting through as much as you can.

Steve called it your Rage Monster.

You called it Stress Relief...because you're a fucking lady.

Hmph.

He gently pulled you over to him and planted a kiss on your cheek.  

He knew better than to go back there until you had your nest the way you wanted it.  

It would make you severely angry and upset...and of course he didn't want that.

He nuzzled his nose into your neck and placed a few kisses there all the while drawing his hand down your back.

"I swear, baby." he said. "I just thought you were being cute.  I always think you're cute when you're in nest mode."

You blinked at him a few times really grateful for the close proximity.

His scent really could calm you down like no other.

"Well then." you said. "I'm about to be positively adorable."

And with that you smacked him in the face with one of the pillows.  

"Fluff and scent, please." you instructed before turning back to your nesting.

Steve did as you asked and just watched you work.

Fourty five minutes later and he had to admit that you'd created a little haven in the back of the SUV.

He'd been put on fluffing and scenting duty and instructed to set all the hot food in the floorboard so that the heat could blow on it and keep it warm.

You'd arranged the blankets six times before you were satisfied and hung up extra clothes over the back windows for privacy and to piece together a projection screen.

You just knew that battery charged projecter port would be useful.

And Steve said you would never use it.

Hmph, Etsy can solve everything.  

What did he know?

#you'rekindofaddictedtoshopping #hoarder

When he was done he just sat there and watched you sit in the middle of it all.

"Is it ready?" he asked.

"Maybe." you said with a little laugh.  "Please hand me the food?"

Steve passed you all the food that required heat and let you set it up how you wanted before he climbed in the back with you.

Having the good sense to leave his shoes and yours in the front under in the floor board.

God forbid, he bring dirty shoes into your nest.

He'd likely lose a toe if he did.

"This looks amazing." he praised you and had to hold back his 'aww' when you involuntarily and unknowingly purred.

A purring Omega was an happy Omega.

You busied yourself with setting up plates of food for the both of you and getting a movie ready to project from your lap top to the makeshift projector screen of tshirts, lol.

He teased you for all your junk and how  much stuff you supposedly had to be prepared for.

But in reality he loved it.

This time it worked out that ya'll actually needed it.

But in reality, he just loved you because you actually cared enough to think about stuff like that.

Everyone always said how lucky you were to have Captain America as your Alpha.

But Steve Rogers knew he was the lucky one.

He'd been blessed by the gods, won the lottery, whatever you'd like to call it...because you actually wanted him.

So no, the romantic evening hadn't gone as planned but as he looked around the back of the SUV and took it all in...he suddenly didn't miss it.

Hot leftovers from all the different things the two of you had eaten that week.

A cute little Disney movie projected on several white t-shirts.

A comfy nest of pillows, blankets and jackets.

And most importantly, you.

His sweet, cuddly little darling, just waiting for him to wrap his arms around.

Suddenly, he was very fond of this blizzard after all.

Heeeeeey, smoochies! I hope you enjoyed this little Steve imagine! Alpha! Steve and Omega! Plus Size Reader is one of my favorites!  And while it's just fall here in the US ...I have quite the love affair with winter in my heart.   I live for the colder months.  Anyway, I was listening to some beautiful winter sounds this morning and just had to share this little number floating around in my head! If you like it and want more Alpha! Steve and Omega! Plus Size Reader please be sure to let me know in the comment section!  Happy Reading!

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Love, Kenny

[halloweenvalentine1997]

A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.

When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises

about my skull. I saw her die behind static.

By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I

bewailed her, screaming,

burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.

I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.

I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard

and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the

iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.

Seeing them all in a hole

through the light emitting

through the asylum blinds.

I myself am a corpse in a bed

in the forensics ward,

green moths on my blanket,

rotting silently in a pastel grave,

killed by medicine,

wasted by time.

If you come close enough to hear my thoughts

(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)

distort and clamor

amongst the traffic, the television,

the noise a death in a family brings,

I will let loose my hatred

like a ribbon from hair,

unraveling red Medusa strands.

I will draw more ribbons on your flesh

if you touch me,

bleed you into the wood,

hammer a nail into your heartline,

devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine

to my malevolent blood.

2013

Stacey

1.

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

2.

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne?


Where is my prairie song?


Where is my happy ending?


Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

3.

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

2019

Stacey

I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.

I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”

I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”

I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.

I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.

I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.

So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.

“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.

I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.

Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time.  My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.

I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.

“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”

In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.

When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”

They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.

Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”

“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”

“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”

“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”

Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”

“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”

“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.

And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug  therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.

“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.

She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.

You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.

2016

Mathilde

1.

In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.  

I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.

“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.

I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.

Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.

*

“Mathilde-”

“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.

“Mathilde!”

“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.

In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.

I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.

“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”

I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.

The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.

He’s dead.

I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.

I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.

“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.

We laugh.

*

I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.

But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.

“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.

I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.

Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.

I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.

2.

Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.

I had never known her to fall apart.

I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.

He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.

When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.

Do not turn away, my friend

Like a willow I can bend

No man calls my name

No man came

So I walked on down away from you

Maybe your attention was more

Than you could do

One man did not call

He asked me for my love

And that was all

The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.

Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.

The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.

“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.

Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.

I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.

I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.

Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.

I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.

I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.

I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.

All I wanted was to end time.

To corrupt and corrode.

To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.

3.

I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.

Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.

Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane.  Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.

Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.

4.

I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.

Do not touch me, I command every living human.

There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.

2019

Mathilde

1.

They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.

My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.

2.

I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.

The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.

3.

I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.

“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”

I love her.

I miss her.

I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.

4.

I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.

2019

Stacey

They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.

“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

“It’s late.”

“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”

She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.

“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets.  A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”

They leave.

I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.

I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”

It reads:

1.

“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.

We’re used to it.”

2.

This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.

Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn.   I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.

I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.

3.

Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say,  “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.

4.

My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.

2015

Janine

Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).

Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.

What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.

Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.

What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.

Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire.  Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.

Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.

Fanatics.

Chaos itself.

Dysfunctional child-abusers.

Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.

So far, Janine had killed seven people.

Her victims:

1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino

2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully

3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher

4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King

5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill

6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender

7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner

*

When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.

“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.

In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.

Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.

“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”

Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.

How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.

 

                               Amanda

I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than  myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead. 

I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl.


 

*

Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.

2019

Mathilde

My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.

I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.

Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.

It runs on like this:

It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.

“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.

When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.

“Mildred!”

I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.

They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.

“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.

“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”

She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.

2019

Stacey

In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.

Marcelle

2012

Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.

Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.

The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.

On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.

“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.

“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“

In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”

All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.

“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral  bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.

“Nanny, I  hope you enjoy your milk,”

“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk  in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.

“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”

Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.

Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat  slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.

June

2014

My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”

On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.

There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.

When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.

My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.

“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.

My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.

Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.

I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.

“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor  and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”

She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “

“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”

“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.

“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.

She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.

“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”

I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.

“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.

I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested.  I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.

“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”

“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.

*

Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.

My lucidity will live again, resurged.

2017

June and Marcelle

Cathleen Carter

She led me to the house with the cupola

Where she stabbed me in the backyard

Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin

Staining my white blouse

And my throat ached

I haunt the halls

And my voice resides within the walls

I’m a phantom floating through the inmates

Living in my killer’s group home

Eyes stare from the cupola

I don’t know who saw me die

I’m buried under a thorny bush

Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth

She scattered

Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides

She stabbed my baby

And cut me for giving birth

In her bed

My lover carved our initials in a tree

And we’ll always be in touch

I eat strawberries off a plate in his room

We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares

Of me being tortured by her ringed hands

Bag placed over my head

Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen

(I have killed many)

Choking on film reel

Always having to be polite

In the morning light drinking tea

Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB

Putting me to sleep

Separated from my lover

Pillow soaked in warm tears

His tears and mine

We drink them in vials and kiss under stars

Soon he too will be a ghost

Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery

Deirdre will find us and take our picture

Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera

*

With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.

All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.

“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”

“I don’t know,” said June.

The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid   (after turning off the video camera)

of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.

They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.

“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”

“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her  mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought

miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.

But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.

“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.

Cathleen

My baby is gone

In an infant coffin underground

I wear black to mourn her

And place flowers on her grave

Miles embraces me in the cemetery

Where we have sandwiches and milk

He marvels as the food disappears from the plate

And the milk drains from the thermos

He can see me fresh as daylight

A rose haloed in gold

I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair

They find him dead the next day

By the gravesite of his daughter

His lips blue from the pills

His hair plastered to his head

In the spring rain

His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:

I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.

I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.

Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.

The Ouija Board

“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”

“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”

Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.

“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.

“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.

“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.

Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.

“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”

“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.

“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.

“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”

“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.

Deirdre

High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls

I can’t return to it

I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.

I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.

I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.

I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.

I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.

June

I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant.  I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.

I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.

Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should  remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.

But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?

I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.

There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.

I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?

I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.

Mathilde

2019

I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.

He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”

“I-“ I began.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly.  He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.

*

I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.

[shirtlesssammy]

10x12: About a Boy

At a bar in Pendleton, Oregon, two men almost break out in a grand old bar fight. One kicks the other, JP, out and tells him he’ll kill JP if he sees him around again. JP’s a little worse for wear and he stumbles off to his car. The tooth fairy A man appears behind JP, and grabs what appears to be a hex bag and JP is engulfed in a bright light. A homeless man looks on, rushing to JP’s car, only to find nothing but his empty suit sizzling on the ground.

Dean is in a bad way, guys. The Mark of Cain is haunting his every thought and removing it is consuming his every action. He’s in full-on research mode, which means things are really bad.

For Library Science:

Sam checks in on his big bro (in his VERY messy bedroom, ugh. It hurts to look at.) He’s got a case --missing people. Dean’s gonna sit this one out, thx Sam. Sam refuses to listen to Dean’s pity party and gives him the old Football Coach lecture about getting out there and beating this thing. To ease into agreeing with Sam, Dean makes fun of him for believing in the Easter Bunny until he was 12. Sam, knowing he got Dean, partially agrees (he was 11 ½).

They head off on the road. Once in Oregon, they interview the homeless man that saw the abduction. He explained it all and while he didn’t smell sulfur, he did smell flowers. They were flowery flowers. Also, he knows exactly what’s going on --Aliens. Specifically, probing aliens. 

The boys are at a loss and decide to split up to investigate. Dean heads inside to the bar, while Sam heads to JP’s place.

At the bar Dean orders a drink and talks up the bartender about JP.

While the bartender didn’t have much, a woman, Tina, at the bar knew JP a bit (I like the idea that Dean decided to listen to her, not because she mentioned JP, but because she dropped a pop culture reference. She’s speaking his language.) Later, we find Tina and Dean bonding over their shitty childhoods (#JohnWinchesterA+parenting). I don’t know what this says about my own childhood but I totally added ketchup to mac and cheese as a kid. And he added Fluff marshmallow mix to mac and cheese? No wonder Sam had a sweet tooth that he’s spent his entire adult life trying to suppress. Sam phones Dean and Tina makes her exit.

Sam has nothing good to report. (Uh, I’m just going to skip right over the weird devil’s butt joke because, what? I find zero humor in Sam’s Lucifer trauma. My in-show excuse for this is the Mark of Cain.) Just as Dean is admitting to Sam that he’s got nothing, he sees Buddy the Elf’s mailroom friend a man follow Tina out of the bar. He cuts Sam off and follows. He hears a scream, sees a light flash, and pulls his gun. He finds nothing but her clothes --and before he knows it, the man grabs his hex bag necklace and Dean is blasted with bright light.

He awakens in a basement cell, and to a MUCH younger face.

Oh dear, our Dean Bean is now a tiny Dean Sprout. There’s a girl in the next cell ---Tina. She’s freaking out a bit, but Dean assures her that he won’t let anything happen to her anything else happen to her. ALL PRAISE DYLAN EVERETT. I just love his portrayal of Dean. He just nails every beat of Dean. There’s another boy in the cell with Tina who Dean realizes is JP. He’s whisked away by the man before the others can stop it.

At the bar, Sam doesn’t find Dean so he tries calling him. The bartender has a phone that mysteriously rings to Sam’s call. HMMM.

The Moose™ faceplants the dude into the bar to get some answers.

Meanwhile, in Cellblock C, Dean is busy enjoying a piece of cake. Dude. DUDE. Tina thinks the cake was poisoned. Which, lol, Dean way to think ahead. He stops eating it reluctantly. And then he starts to formulate an idea to break them out of their prison. Using part of a bed frame, he tries jimmying the window open (and declares that he’s a “functioning alcoholic” --I see no lie, unfortunately). Tina wants to know who/what he is. “That is a long-ass story,” Dean responds. Ha, 14 years and going!

Sam finds Dean’s clothes and gun behind the bar. He also find flower pollen all over Dean’s gun.

Just as Dean has made some headway on their escape, the man comes back. Tina tells Dean to get out. She’ll distract the man while Dean gets help. She starts to scream while Dean makes his escape.

Sam is busy researching yarrow at their motel when a knock sounds at his door. Dean’s there! And Sammy is surprised. Dean is in full hunter mode and bursts into the room and finds his things. Sam needs a moment, but Dean doesn’t have that. He needs to save Tina. HOW IS HE STILL THE OLDER BROTHER? I believe this on a cellular level. This child is bossing Sam around and it’s amazing. Dean runs out. A woman in the next room is heading into her place and drops her keys. Dean stops and picks them up for her. She compliments a frazzled Sam on what a polite son he’s raising. LOLOL. Dean’s driving, but one bench seat adjustment makes Sam suggest Dean take shotgun.

They head out to save Tina. While Sam drives them to the witch’s creepy, old house, they talk about Dean’s sudden de-aging. Dean confesses his troubling enjoyment of a Taylor Swift song in addition to other puberty-related bodily hijinks. The biggest change though? The Mark has disappeared from his arm. I have…so many questions. Does it exist in some pocket universe waiting for Dean to grow up again? Does he still carry it...just not the scar? Knowing what we know now about the function of the Mark, this is the only thing that gives me pause about this episode - the rest of which I LOVE. Dean entertains the idea of staying a teen if it means he doesn’t have the Mark anymore. (Boris: I think it’s still there, but won’t show itself until Dean ages to the point when he got it.)

At the witch’s house, Tina’s already been removed from her cell. Dean sneaks in through his cellar window while giant moose Sam finds his own way in. Watching Dean carefully stalk the basement, it’s suddenly easy to picture him while he was young - hunting creatures clutching a gun and a flashlight and grown up far too quickly. We don’t have much time to reflect on this, though, because the creepy guy who stalked after Tina shows up. “I’m not a witch,” the guy protests when they confront him at last. “I just work for one.”

The guy starts to plead, confessing that he’s worked for the witch for centuries doing terrible things. For example, he was forced to eat “poor Gretel’s heart.” Oooooh my. Meet Hansel of THE Hansel and Gretel, folks. Dean’s on board with killing a famous witch.

“You can’t kill her,” Hansel tells them. “You’re just men.”

Sam identifies themselves as hunters and Hansel immediately volunteers to help them kill the witch. Sam first demands to know how to turn Dean back. That this isn’t Dean’s first priority is a lovely nod to his character and also a little heartbreaking. It turns out that turning back into an adult is easy. Just squeeze the hex bag around Hansel’s neck and BOOM you’re transformed.

Upstairs, the witch prepares vegetables for her young-child stew. JP, she grouses, didn’t have much meat on his bones. But stew is a great way to stretch meat, amirite? For Tina, the witch envisions a nice sweet chili glaze and an apple in her mouth. (Boris: How great is it that Mrs. Patmore is COOKING in her guest spot on this show?)

It turns out that the witch has a walk-in oven. As one does. When Dean, Sam, and Hansel emerge from the basement, she’s nothing but pleased. Her joy should be off-putting but it’s okay. The Winchesters and Hansel are a united front against her! Oh wait, it turns out that Hansel gleefully ate his own sister and is allied with the witch. Things go south quickly and both brothers are soon disarmed and held at gunpoint by Hansel.

The witch grouses about society these days. She used to steal and eat children back when child mortality was so high that nobody missed the odd kid here or there. Now she transforms adults that no one will miss into children and eats them instead. Is that...recycling?

While she cuts vegetables, the witch reveals that she’s in the U.S. for the first time and appreciates our body fat just as much as the Leviathans. Um. Thanks? She’d been sent by the Grand Coven to hunt down Rowena. (Any theories I had that the Grand Coven was somehow more civilized, or less murdery than Rowena just went out the window.) While the witch is temporarily distracted by their discussion about Rowena, Sam makes his move. Dean tries to help but gets pummeled by Hansel. He’s young and small, after all. The witch stokes the fire, her victory imminent, and orders Hansel to turn Sam into a child as well.

Dean rises to the occasion and hauls out the hex bag that he stole from Hansel’s neck during their fight. He grabs it, transforms back into adult Dean, and uses the surprise and his adult size to drive a knife home between Hansel’s ribs. Dean does what Hansel never could and stuffs the witch plus her hex bag into her giant walk-in oven. She burns into nothing.

Outside, they talk with the still-young Tina. She asks about transforming back into an adult but the Winchesters sadly inform her that the hex bag was destroyed. They don’t have a spell at the ready to turn her back but they can probably figure it out. Tina thinks about this for a moment. She has ex-husbands, a ton of debt, and a sorrowful adult life. If she stays young, she can take this as a second chance for building a better life for herself. Dean’s not jealous of this AT ALL. They drive her to the bus stop, give her all their cash (because they’re good dudes), and see her off on her new life. (I always scoffed at people who yearned to go back to their childhood, but a “do-over” is certainly a compelling argument for de-aging.) (Boris: If I knew what I know now, I’d do it over again in a heartbeat.)

After Tina leaves, they mull over this new bit of information about a “Grand Coven.” Dean thinks it sounds like an eighties hair metal band. YES. Sam’s not in the mood for jokes, though. He asks Dean about the Mark.

Dean pulls up his sleeve to reveal it and Sam has to look away for a moment in disappointment. Sam tells Dean that he “pulled a Dean Winchester” by sacrificing something in order to save Sam and Tina. Oh. Man. That’s so true. (I’ll just be over here weeping in the corner.) Regardless of the Mark, however, Sam’s happy to have Dean restored. He missed his brother. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”

Dean drives them out of town while Taylor swift sings about shaking it off. (This led to the Hillywood Sisters singing about Shaking it Off as well. We are truly #blessed.)

Quote it off, Quote it off:

Those suckers, they grabbed me, and they probed me everywhere.

Son of a Bitch.

Yahtzee.

Hiya, Sammy.

Hey, we got any grenades?

About time this gig got an R rating.

I’m a freakin’ teen and you look like some One Direction reject!

I can still hunt, I’m just…dewier.

You can drink in another seven years.

If you’re going to fry that candy-coated bitch, I want in.

Word on the street is people kinda taste like chicken.

I’m painting a word picture here.

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive! 

[senor-plume]

Commedia

I love a good comedy

divine and others

and I know soon I'll end up in one of Dante’s circles (and I can't speak one word of Italian) but which one?

I've flattered a few folks in my day... I've sold people out...a traitor of sorts... I've dived into flesh passion... I've engaged in sodomy...but I am a repentant sodomite! I've been fraudulent on occasion...

and of course...a few others

but is it measured against the fine things I have done in this incarnation of life?

I've raised two boys with kindness, love and patience... I've treated animals with care and the warm hand of love... I've made tea for my ladies when cramps hit them bad...(with golden honey) I've never taken a man’s life away from him... I put a Bon Jovi cassette into a microwave oven and melted that shit down I've never once masturbated to a starlet making millions of dollars...

and so on...

but religion and it's theory's tell you... or force you to believe that the hand of God is all powerful and (help us all) fair...in His eyes

this sentence that I am currently going through makes me reflect upon my somewhat useless life

I've come to the dreadful conclusion that my bad works will out way my good works...

(kind of like Jimmy Carter administration)

so, I am doomed to the entrails of the henchmen of Satan...

to be swallowed once and again... for eternity

and hell, all the beer I drink now just to forget this Earthly pain ain't gonna help me then

nothing will and I guess, now as I stare my demise with every X I make on the calendar there’s really nothing I can do about it

you cant unkill what you already killed you cant unfuck what you've already fucked... ..and so on

and when I think about it deeply I suppose I just want a way to suck up and get a chair on Satan’s board of advisors

kind of like my Dad climbing up in the corporate banking world to make Vice President

unlike him though, I'll have to deal with The Fallen Angles horns poking into my flesh every second

probably better than going on business retreats and certainly better than the cafeteria food

comedy can mold pain and turn it into something humorous

I hope that’s true

I'll know the answer much faster than I ever expected

and if I can I'll try and pass my laughing screams of agony onto you

you'll know I'm around when the faint smell of sulfur reaches you and the clouds take on a jaundice appearance

My Escaped Circle:

The Jaundice Cloud Of Sulfur

...as Living On A Prayer plays on beyond the clouds

with me, yellow and unable to do a fucking thing to stop it

[joeybelle]

Oh, how the tables have turned - Part 6

Inspired by @clyde-prompts: “Some guys are rude and use ableist slurs against Clyde. The reader is with them, and although she feels bad about what’s happening, is too scared to say anything in front of her “friends”. She comes back to the bar a couple nights later to try and show him she’s not a bad person. They get to know each other and fall in love”. Doesn’t fully follow the prompt.

Warnings: Language, first person POV, mentions of wasps and bug spray - lethal combo, IDK what I’m doing.

Word count: ~4700

Rating: Mature

Setting: Pre-heist

A.N: I kept delaying this part because I wanted to post it together with part 7 (since 5, 6 and 7 are meant to be one big chapter), but it isn’t finished yet and it might take a while until I finish it since Sunday is my only day off and that might be pretty busy too. Anyway I hope you guys enjoy it and sorry for the wait! Any feedback is more than welcome, and if you’re bored send me a message, I love talking to people. Just remember that I’m on European time and if I don’t reply right away I might be sleeping or at work.

Tags: @lonelyravenclaw @kyloren-supreme-ben @onmyknees4steve @elsablackswift @helloimindelaware @mwcritics @makingtimemine @littlekylo

Saturday came with an unexpected wave of heat and humidity that left me unable to move without sweating buckets. Still, I was thankful it wasn’t raining again, although by the way the air felt it would probably start raining soon. Since my house had no AC, I was a bit reluctant to have people over. Nothing I could do now, besides keeping cold drinks on hand and setting up the garden hose in case anyone needed some quick cooling down. (Me. It was definitely going to be me.)

Finding all the ingredients to make muffins from scratch had been a challenge, especially since it seemed that everyone and their mother chose to make something involving blueberries. After getting the ‘I’m sorry, we just sold the last one’ answer from all the local stores, I headed to the nearest supermarket, and then to the next one, where I had to battle a couple of old ladies to get my hands on some. I only won because I was faster, but by the look they gave me as I ran away with the blueberries, they were set on getting revenge. I would have to live in fear for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, when Jimmy’s car pulled into the driveway, I had everything ready. I was pretty sure I had enough ingredients to potentially feed a small village, but I was really excited by the prospect of baking. It had been a long time since I had a working kitchen and the time to cook (and also, someone to cook for), so I may have exaggerated a bit. I was planning to make blueberry muffins, chocolate chip, raspberry and white chocolate, and maybe banana if anyone wanted more. And sandwiches for lunch, something quick and filling that I could put together in minutes so I could help if they needed me. There was a chicken parmesan casserole already prepped in the fridge, ready to throw in the oven for a filling dinner later on. By the amount of materials piled in my garage, it wasn’t a job that would be finished in a few hours.

Sadie bolted out of the car with a huge grin on her face and attacked me right away. Jimmy looked reasonably awake, but Clyde looked like a total mess. I guessed he really wasn’t used to waking up this early, since I assumed he was pulling long hours at the bar. I felt bad for him, but not so bad that I wouldn’t smile at his sleepy face.

“I have coffee,” I said instead of good morning.

“Don’t worry about him,” Jimmy laughed, earning a sideways glance from his brother. “It just takes a while to wake the bear from hibernation.”

“Well, I’m sorry…”

“One,” Clyde interrupted me, and it took me a moment to understand what he was talking about, but the tiny smirk in the corner of his mouth clued me in.

“That’s playing dirty,” I said, crossing my arms. Technically I wasn’t apologizing to him, so it didn’t count. Did it?

“Still counts,” he mumbled as he passed me.

I shook my head and smiled. This was going to be a long day, and I would enjoy the hell out of it. “Anyone want breakfast?” I offered, but Jimmy shook his head.

“We’re good,” he said, pulling a ladder out of the back of his truck. “We better get started soon before it gets too hot.”

“Well, at least come and get some coffee. It’s cold brewed.”

“What’s that?” Jimmy asked, a confused look on his face.

“It’s a fancy type of iced coffee,” Clyde explained. “You put it in cold water and…”

“Why would you drink cold coffee,” Jimmy asked me, completely ignoring his brother who shut his mouth with a frown.

“It’s refreshing,” I said, shrugging. “It’s perfect for hot weather.”

He didn’t seem convinced. “Yeah, it’s just some of that sophisticated New York shit you brought with you, isn’t it?”

“Oh come on,” I laughed. “It’s not that fancy. It’s just imported Brazilian coffee that I ground yesterday especially for you guys. Coarse ground, steeped into cold spring water for a whole day. Perfect!”

“Wow,” was all Jimmy had to say, but I could see him stifling a laughter.

“Authentic Brazilian coffee and expensive vodka? You must be really high maintenance,” Clyde said, with a serious face.

“Yeah,” I said, winking. “As high maintenance as someone without a working AC unit, a leaking roof and a mostly unfurnished house can be.”

He smiled and I let Sadie drag me for a tour of the house. It wasn’t much to see, but she was really excited to find Clyde the Bear occupying half of my bed. To my embarrassment, I had to admit that I had gotten used to sleeping with the huge toy. It was a really good cuddle buddy and I had gotten into the habit of talking to it when I was feeling like the house was too empty. Yes, I was that pathetic.

Fortunately, Sadie was the only one to see it, and I was sure none of the adults would invade my bedroom without permission, so I would be spared the embarrassment. Unfortunately, my secret had been safe exactly one minute and twenty-five seconds, exactly how long it took Sadie to find her uncle and rat me out.

“What?” I replied to Clyde’s amused smile. “I’m basically five. I have no idea who let me be an adult.” If you have no plausible excuse, just run with it. Better than trying to deny it and fuel the teasing. “You lost a muffin for spilling my secret, little lady,” I said, pointing a finger at a laughing Sadie.

Clyde’s smile grew broader seeing that I wasn’t denying it, but it wasn’t a mocking smile. He was quite cute that Saturday morning, with his sleepy face and his messy hair that looked curlier than usually. There was still a tiny bit of his usual shyness, but it wasn’t as noticeable as before.

“Anything I can help you guys with?” I asked, when Jimmy returned from my garage with some more tools.

“Umm… no, not yet,” he said, scratching his head and looking at the roof. “We’ll call you if we need help.”

“Alright,” I said, turning to Sadie. “Do you wanna help me make muffins? I’m not sure I can do everything myself.”

She excitedly followed me to the kitchen. I had made some space the day before, moved the boxes to a corner of the living room, replaced the dining table with a smaller, foldable one I found in storage. Even with an energetic kid running around, there was less of a chance of any accidents happening. Or at least, I hoped. The memory of Clyde catching me in his arms was still pretty fresh in my mind.

To my surprise Sadie was really good at following directions and actually gave her best. I would have been able to make all the muffins in maybe a third of the time if I had done them at my own pace, but the point was to entertain her while her dad fixed my roof. I didn’t get to spend much time with kids while I lived in New York, since I’d been too busy surviving, but Sadie was such a good kid that I actually enjoyed it. She was quite talkative, telling me stories about her brothers, her mom and dad, about her school and about Clyde and Mellie, so by the time the first batch of muffins were in the oven, I felt like I had been part of the Logan family for ages.

Working in the kitchen ended up being a bit distracting, I found out pretty early on. After getting out all the necessary materials, they set up the ladder and Jimmy climbed into the attic, leaving Clyde on the ground to hand him things. Right in front of my kitchen window. I fought the urge to call my parents and curse them for designing the only entrance to our otherwise unused attic right in front of my window, so I’d be forced to watch Clyde Logan stretch as he handed tools to his brother, but I remembered that the house was built by my grandparents, and I’d need an Ouija board to contact them. But as time passed and my eyes kept darting to the man outside—whose t-shirt was juuust a bit too tight and his muscles just a bit too taut—I was actually considering Ouija-ing some carefully considered well-wishes to my ancestors. I did my best, however, to focus on something else.

If I were to be completely honest, if Sadie hadn’t been there to distract me from being too distracted by Clyde, I would have probably just pulled a chair in front of the counter, poured myself a perfectly brewed cup of iced coffee and indulged into staring out the window. I mean, that’s how a considerable amount of porn movies started: a hot dude fixing something, a horny woman leering at him and the rough sex that follows, I thought, absentmindedly fanning myself with a napkin, and it wasn’t because of the constantly increasing temperature in my kitchen.

“Do you like uncle Clyde?” Sadie asked, making me snap out of my thoughts.

“Yeah, don’t you?” I tried deflecting the question, turning around and opening the fridge. The cool air coming out of it was a blessing. I really needed to get some air conditioning installed as soon as possible.

“Yeah, but that’s not what I asked,” she giggled.

Of course not. “What did you ask, then?” Play dumb until they get bored, I thought to myself, however I had forgotten just how persistent kids could be.

“If you like like him,” she said in a serious tone.

“How do you like like someone?” Keep playing dumb.

“Oh you know,” she giggled once again and hopped of the chair coming next to me and the still open fridge. “You wanna go with them on dates, and hold hands, and kiss… and make babies and then get married and live happily ever after.”

Well, that escalated quickly. “In that order?” I asked, getting two sodas from the fridge and finally closing it, just as it started hysterically beeping at me.

Sadie shrugged as she took the can I handed her. “So do you like him?” she continued, making me almost choke on my drink.

“What makes you ask that?” I tried further deflecting the question, because kids should never be trusted with sensitive information, certainly not one as talkative as Sadie.

“You keep staring at him,” she laughed and I cursed myself for being caught red-handed.

“I don’t stare at him,” I lied, but I was sure it wasn’t very convincing. “I was just looking out the window, that’s all.” Sadie kept smiling and I shook my head. In the end it’s not like it was that big of a secret that I liked him. After all, he knew and he was the only one that mattered. But I didn’t really want her blurting it out in public and making it more awkward than it already was. “Okay, maybe,” I said, giving her a serious look. “But that’s gonna be our secret. If you tell anyone I’m gonna find out where you live, hide under your bed and tickle you right as you’re falling asleep,” I threatened, approaching her while wiggling my fingers in a pretty menacing way. “Promise?”

“Promise!” she giggled, trying to hide from my tickle attack.

“Okay, great! Do you want a sandwich?” I changed the subject. I was starting to think that

The Logans would age me prematurely. Not that I needed any help in that department.

I showed Sadie how to make some icing, just to keep her busy while I put together some sandwiches. She wanted a turkey ham one, with extra mayo and crusts cut off and I made it exactly as she wanted it. Cut it into quarters to make it easier to eat, but Sadie was really taking her whisking job seriously, so I resorted to feeding the pieces to her over the bowl.

I glimpsed out the window to see an amused Clyde watching me feed his niece, a big piece of my own sandwich sticking— pretty comically I assumed— out of my mouth, his hands full with what looked like some old wood. I shoved another piece of sandwich into Sadie’s mouth, swallowed what remained of mine and went to open the window. The boys had been working for quite some time, so I assumed they’d be hungry already. I knew I was, and the only thing I had done all morning was watch a kid paint my kitchen in muffin batter.

“Would you like to take a break? Grab something quick to eat?” I asked, leaning onto the counter, and trying to get my head out the window. He didn’t seem opposed to the idea, and after throwing the old wood in a pile of garbage, he climbed up the ladder to talk to his brother.

“Jimmy said he’s not hungry yet. Maybe later.”

“Are you hungry?” I pressed, because he really looked like he had skipped breakfast. While the cup of coffee I had given him earlier seemed to have woken him up, he still looked a little sluggish.

“A bit,” he shrugged.

“Ok, I’ll make you a sandwich and you can eat it while working,” I said and he nodded. “What would you like?”

“Anything is fine.”

I quickly put some things together, making something that was definitely not instagram ready, but it was pretty filling and I knew it would taste pretty good. Placed it on a plate and pushed it towards the open window.

Clyde had come down from the ladder, a new layer of dust and debris covering him. He had specks of dust caught in his hair and a dark smudge on his nose, like he had tried scratching it with dirty hands. He had to at least take a break and wash his hands, but Jimmy called him from the attic, needing something else. It seemed he wouldn’t be having a moment to spare.

I sighed and pulled back the sandwich, cut it into small wedges like I did with Sadie’s and grabbed a piece.

“Clyde, come here,” I called, extending my arm through the open window, once he was back on the ground. He looked at the dirt covering his hands and then at the piece of sandwich in mine. “Bite,” I said motioning to the food. He looked at it a little confused, but then smiled and came closer. He bent down to my level and took a tentative bite. “Put more strength into it, Logan,” I laughed.

I didn’t even try to keep a straight face, because a grown man, built like a brick shithouse eating out of my hand was both comical and surprisingly enticing. He was also laughing and I hoped he wouldn’t choke on the food, because I was sure I wouldn't be able to pull the Heimlich maneuver on him. He took another quick bite as Jimmy called his name again and his lips briefly brushed my fingers. I could feel the blood rush to my cheeks, and I returned to the kitchen.

“Don’t laugh at us, young lady,” I said, pointing at Sadie with what was left of the sandwich, “we’re Adults.”

I had to quickly check on the muffins in the oven. They were done so I took them out, placed them on the cooling rack and shoved another batch in. By the time I was done, Clyde had returned and was hovering near the window. I hopped onto the counter to be able to reach better. I gestured for him to stick his head inside as I took another piece of sandwich and brought it to his lips. He was a little too enthusiastic taking a bite and accidentally nipped my finger.

“My fingers aren’t part of the meal, Logan,” I laughed, while Sadie climbed onto a chair next to me.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and I could see a blush creeping up his cheeks.

“One!” I grinned, because now I wasn’t at a disadvantage anymore.

I took another piece of sandwich and shoved it into Sadie’s giggling mouth. By now I was sure that both of them could feed themselves, but it was just too funny to stop and both of them seemed to enjoy it.

“I’m your bird mama now,” I proudly announced, placing the last bits of food into the open and waiting mouths of my newly adopted baby birds.

A loud shriek coming from above made me jump off the counter, knocking over a glass that shattered on the floor. Clyde scrambled to remove himself from the window without breaking anything, and hurried to climb up the ladder only to be almost knocked down by a panicked Jimmy.

“What the fuck?” I breathed, completely forgetting that there was a child with me and I should have been watching my language. I grabbed Sadie and carried her over the shattered glass, hurrying to get out the door and see what was going on.

“Do you have bees or wasps in your attic?” she asked, and seemed a lot calmer than me.

“Maybe?” It was possible, I couldn’t deny it. “Is he allergic to them?” I asked, feeling a cold shiver run down my spine.

“No,” she giggled, and somehow that didn’t do anything to calm me down. “Just scared.”

I dropped the girl down on the grass and ran towards her father. Jimmy looked a little pale and his breathing was laboured, but didn’t look injured.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He got scared of some wasps, that’s what happened,” Clyde explained with a frown on his face, but I couldn’t tell if his tone was judgemental or not.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, placing a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “I had a team come over right after I moved here and they said they took care of any rodents or insects. They told me I had some wasps in the attic, but that they sprayed everywhere and removed the nests and that it shouldn't be a problem anymore. It’s my fault, I should have checked beforehand.” Now I realized just how stupid and unprepared I was. What if he was allergic and he had gotten stung. I didn’t really want to imagine what would have happened.

“No, no! It’s not your fault. I know there are wasps in attics, and I checked before starting work, but these… these just came out of nowhere and I panicked.”

“I’m so sorry, Jimmy,” I apologized again.

“He just needs a cold beer and he’ll be fine,” Sadie said, showing up out of nowhere with a beer bottle in her hand. She seemed really used to this situation, so it might have been a somewhat common occurrence.

“Thanks, Sadie-bug,” Jimmy said, taking the bottle from her hand.

“Hey, you shouldn’t go into the kitchen,” I said, frowning at her, suddenly remembering the broken glass. “There’s glass everywhere.”

“It’s okay, I jumped over it,” she smiled, incredibly proud of herself, completely ignoring the fact that she could have slipped and landed in the pile of shards. Yep, the Logans would be the death of me. I sighed.

“Well, y’all wait here while I go clean up and fetch the bug spray.”

“I’ll help,” Clyde offered, and I didn’t stop him.

As the day was getting hotter, so was my kitchen. With the oven running for so long, it was almost too much. I could feel beads of sweat starting to form on my forehead. Clyde seemed to be taking it even worse than me, but I almost expected it, with his fair skin and all. I considered opening another window, but at this point I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, since it seemed to be just as hot outside too. We’d have to suffer.

Clyde started sweeping the floor while I took the muffins out of the oven. Due to the whole commotion I had forgotten I had some in, but luckily I saw them in time, before they turned into a pile of charcoal. Sadie would have been sad. I kept glancing at Clyde as I moved around the kitchen. His t-shirt was quickly getting soaked, and I couldn’t stop looking at how it stuck to his broad back. Get a hold of yourself, you foul woman, I scolded myself and I started looking for the bug spray.

“Three,” he said as he caught me stealing another glance.

“What? No! Nope. It wasn’t said to you, it doesn’t count.”

“It does count.”

“No it doesn’t,” I said, pointing a finger at his nose. “Plus it was something I had to apologize for. Someone nearly died attacked by wasps.” I didn’t know why I was resisting, after all I just had to buy him a couple of drinks, and to be honest I wasn’t opposed to spending more time with him. I just didn’t want to lose at this stupid game we were playing.

“Well that’s why you have one apology a day,” he said in a serious manner. “Don’t waste it.”

“It wasn’t meant for you so it doesn’t count,” I insisted. “Unless you wanna follow me around to see just how many times I apologize to other people, you won’t be able to know for sure. And come on, don’t make it too easy,” I said, winking at him.

He stopped sweeping and looked at me for a few moments. “Alright,” he said, resigned, “it’s still one, then.”

I grinned and went back to looking for the can of spray. I found it by the time the floor was cleaned and both of us drenched in sweat. With the oven turned off and the window open, I was hoping it would eventually cool down, but there was no sign of that happening anytime soon.

I grabbed the can and went outside, Clyde following me closely. It was some type of industrial grade bug spray I had brought with me from New York. There’s nothing better than New York to teach you how to deal with a bug problem. I knew for a fact that it worked on wasps too, because I manually sprayed some before I called a team of professionals to deal with them.

That being said, I wasn't overly thrilled by the prospect of going into the attic to battle god knows how many angry wasps, but I had no choice.

“I can go up there,” Clyde offered, but I could see he wasn’t thrilled either.

“Nah, you’re too tall to fit in there,” I said. The attic was nothing more than a cramped space between the roof and the ceiling, it wasn’t big enough for Clyde to stand properly.

“But…” he objected.

“My house, my rules,” I cut him off and started climbing the ladder.

The only upside of this whole situation was that Clyde was getting a great view of my ass, as he held onto the ladder to stabilize it. I really hoped he was enjoying the view, because soon I’d probably come back down stung by wasps and doused in bug spray, which I suspected wasn’t such a great look on me. I climbed inside the attic and glanced down. By the light blush on his cheeks and his averted gaze I was pretty sure he’s enjoyed the view. Of course, it could have just been the heart, but it could also have been my ass.

I didn’t step inside as full of courage as I wanted, but at least there was no one up there to watch me cowardly look around for the stingers. The space was incredibly hot and full of dust and my throat and lungs didn’t like it one bit, but I kept as silent as I could so I would hear the wasps. Luckily, there was a big hole in the roof where Jimmy had started taking off the tiles, so there was more than enough light.

I found the culprits after a few minutes of searching. They were trying to build a new nest next to a beam, and I ruthlessly sprayed them before they could attack me. I felt sorry for them, but this was my house and they should have found a better place to invade. I took down the half built nest, as the exterminator had told me to do, and sprayed the spot where it had been attached.

I left the can next to Jimmy’s tools before climbing down. In case anything like this happened again, at least he had a weapon.

“All done,” I said, hopping down the ladder. I was greeted with some enthusiastic cheers. “How about we take that break now? I think the muffins have cooled down by now and they’re awaiting to be tasted.” More enthusiastic cheers. “I think I’ll bring the food outside, it’s a bit too hot and stuffy in the house. Sadie, wanna help me? There’s the hose, you can wash up if you want, or you can use the bathroom inside.”

I placed the food on paper plates and Sadie carried them outside one by one, hopefully without dropping anything on the ground. We placed a big blanket on the grass, because bringing out the table and chairs would be too much work and everyone decided it just wasn’t worth it. Sadie said it felt like a picnic and we just went along with that.  

I came out with cold drinks and nearly dropped the bottles when I rounded the corner, because a shirtless Clyde dousing himself with the garden hose was really something I wasn’t expecting to see. The whole porn idea flashed through my brain again and I almost turned around and went back to the house but that would have been a bit too obvious, especially since Clyde turned his head and looked at me. I averted my gaze and hurried to the blanket.

Jimmy was grinning and I wanted to strangle him.

“Whatever’s behind that grin, I don’t wanna hear it,” I warned him and placed the bottles on the blanket, plopping next to him.

“I ain’t saying nothing!” He lifted his arms in a defensive gesture and opened a beer bottle, but the grin still plastered on his face scared me. So that wasn’t very reassuring.

“Well I can almost hear you thinking it.” I didn’t know what ‘It’ was, but I was scared.

“I don’t have to say anything, your blush speaks for itself,” he said, grabbing a sandwich, and I wanted to shove it down his throat whole so I’d be sure he’d keep his mouth shut, but Sadie reappeared from somewhere around the bushes and I knew better than to allow myself to be violent in front of a kid. For now at least.

However, he kept his word and didn’t say a thing while we ate, but he did snicker when Clyde joined us. He wasn’t shirtless anymore, thank heavens, because if he were I’d probably spontaneously combust, but his t-shirt was wet and stuck to his chest in all the right places and... okay, this wasn’t that much better. I did my best to focus on anything else for the remainder of the meal.

The food— and especially the muffins— had been very well received by the Logans and it made me really happy. It felt nice being appreciated and also it felt nice to be able to do something for the people who were giving up their free time to help me out. I was really lucky that someone cared enough for me to do that.

But I think what made me the happiest was Clyde’s confession that he hadn’t eaten muffins so tasty since the ones his mother used to make. It was sad that since she passed no one made them muffins anymore, so I promised I’d bake more for them if they agreed to build me another mailbox. With hand painted butterflies and all. Jimmy almost choked laughing and recounted the story in more (embarrassing) detail than Clyde had and by the time we finished eating, my jaws were hurting from laughing so hard.

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[greyssoft]

Gfxcardstatus keeps switching

Gfxcardstatus keeps switching pro#

This time hold down + to boot into single-user mode. At this point, reboot the laptop by entering : reboot You can leave this off permanently, or re-enable after you complete the whole process. This is a critical step, as the following commands will not run unless you disable the default SIP protection. This is done by entering : csrutil disable If you can keep the machine cool, it should let you boot to a command prompt. If your machine will not boot up into this mode, you can try putting it into a freezer for 10-15 min beforehand. Power on your laptop while holding ++, this will get you into Recovery/Single-User mode. It also assumes that all kexts are still in their default location /System/Library/Extensions, all AMD-kexts remain except one which is required to be moved. Thunderbolt data and video connections should continue to work as normal. While you will now be able to use your system you will lose the ability to use an external display. This modification will force the laptop to not boot into discrete graphics (dGPU) but directly into integrated graphics (iGPU). If you have a highly modified system with lots of custom kexts, it may not work. I have confirmed that this works, although I did not try with previous versions. My machine is a basic system running High Sierra, version 10.13. After lots of reading, I finally was able to come up with a solution that worked, one that did not require opening up the laptop, or installing Linux. After extensive searching, I found lots of partial solutions, many required booting with Linux, putting the logic board in an oven, or trying to cut power traces on the motherboard. Success, I was finally able to confirm that the GPU was failing.īecause I do not have any application that requires the GPU, I realized if I could somehow disable it, I could be back in business. After finally having the machine stay running long enough for me to reinstall gfxCardStatus, I determined that I could immediately crash the system just by switching graphics modes. The AMD GPU seemed to be the most likely culprit. After some online research, I soon found out about all the issues that have plagued this machine. I did notice that if I started up the machine, but did not login to a user account, it would stay running for quite awhile. I could not find anything that was causing it, it would just be running fine, and then reboot.

Gfxcardstatus keeps switching pro#

Because of this, I never was aware of the issue that thousands of other MacBook Pro owners experienced, a failing GPU causes the machine to either not work at all, have odd display effects, or reboot when video modes are switched.Ībout a year after using this machine as my main media server, it started to randomly reboot. I mainly did this because I did not need the performance, and it definitely affected battery life negatively. Early in its life, I had used gfxCardStatus to disable the discrete AMD graphics card. This laptop had been my main machine for a couple years until I upgraded in 2015. Last year I repurposed a 2011 Macbook Pro 15″ as my home media server. By Jimmy NovemDIY, MacBook Pro, Repair 21 Comments