#old henhouse at the end of that road“

[bisan-is-trying]

I consider quitting at least fifty times a day

[midnight-star-world]

#CountryMusic

Luke Combs - Gettin' Old

So today on the MSR (Midnight Star Review), I would like to talk about the latest album from Country Music Superstar Luke Combs. The new album is titled "Gettin' old" and was released on Friday March 24th, 2023. There are 18 tracks on the new album, but before we dive into the new project. Let's talk about the career of Luke Combs for a little bit first.

Luke Combs has had a lot of success with number ones. And also my Artist of the year, which he had 4 years in a row (2019 to 2022). And might as well consider him for 2023 as well. And Luke has had 12 number ones on my weekly list. My weekly list combines both CMT (Country Music Television), the Billboard Country Music Airplay Charts, & even myself. The list used to include GAC (Great American Country) until the list retired at the end of 2018. Some of the biggest hits from Luke are songs like "Beautiful crazy", "Going, going, gone", & "The kind of love we make". And a few more hits from Luke are songs like "When it rains it pours", "Forever after all", & "Beer never broke my heart". Let's get back to the new Cd up next before we dive too far off track.

The title track that combines this cd with the previous cd is "Growin' up and gettin' old". Other songs you should check out are "Hannah Ford road", "You found yours", & "Still". A song Luke is very proud of from this project is titled "Joe", "Where the wild things are", & his current single is "Love you anyway". But that was a toss up with "5 leaf clover" for the next single, and other songs I liked were "Fast car", & "The part". But the stand out tracks in my opinion were songs like "The beer, the band, and the barstool", "My song will never die", & "Love you anyway". Luke had a hand in co-writing 15 out of 18 tracks, and even help from Eric Church as well. Let's see the rest of the track list now.

Growin' up and gettin' old.

Hannah Ford road.

Back 40 back.

You found yours.

The beer, the band, and the barstool.

Still.

See me now.

Joe.

A song was born.

My song will never die.

Where the wild things are.

Love you anyway.

Take you with me.

Fast car.

Tattoo on a sunburn.

5 leaf clover.

Fox in the henhouse.

The part.

And that's a wrap for the track list. And on the MSR (Midnight Star Review), I would give this album a 5 out of 5 stars. It has a lot of good stand out tracks from the projects. Luke has had a lot of major success in Country music. Luke will have a lot of success from this project in the coming year or years. So if you are a fan of Luke Combs or Country Music now, you should pick up this. Thanks for taking the time to read this review. See ya all next time.

[whitepolaris]

Bigfoot Is Dead-Long Live Bigfoot!

Bigfoot has had some difficult times lately, with the media around the country declaring him dead.

When people think of Bigfoot, they primarily think of the Pacific Northwest, but Bigfoot-like creatures have been reported in all fifty states except Rhode Island and Hawaii. Still, when noted hoaxer and prankster Ray Wallace died at the age of eighty-four on November 26, 2002, family felt it was time to let the world known that Bigfoot's coffin was nailed shut. As his son Michael put it, "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." While Ray's widow, Elna, slipped into a gorilla costume to sport for the camera, other family members recounted how Ray had carved sixteen-inch plywood footprints and left fake tracks. The newspapers ran headlines proclaiming Bigfoot's death. It was obvious that the media loved the story of two crusty old-timers pulling the wool over the true believers' eyes, just as Doug and Dave, two geezers with two much time on their hands, had supposedly created thousands of increasingly elaborate crop circles in the United Kingdom.

Despite all the media spin, Wisconsin's Bigfoot population knows enough not to believe everything it reads in the paper. Bigfoot continues to pop in and out of the public's attention, much as it always had before its exaggerated demise.

Wisconsin has a long history of Bigfoot sightings in every corner of the state, particularly up and down the Wisconsin River valley, from Rhinelander to Prairie du Chien. Paula, Madison schoolteacher, vividly remembers her own experience. "In 1997, I lived on the dead end of Bluff Drive between Pittsville and Marshfield," she says. "One night around eleven p.m., I took the dogs out, and there was a large 'animal' on hind legs thrashing around. It was at least eight feet tall and had long arms and hair. It had come out of the woods, crossed the road, and was coming up the ditch. The dogs went crazy, and I had to physically drag them inside."

Paula's account similar to dozens of others, and it seems entirely possible that many sightings purported to be the Beast of Bray Road could be Bigfoot rather than a werewolf.

The oldest written account we've uncovered is from the Milwaukee Sentinel dated August 17, 1867. The headline reads A "WHAT IS IT" NEAR MILWAUKEE. The article goes on to describe the sighting, which had occurred in Oak Creek, near the Milwaukee-Racine county line. After experiencing a series of chicken-coop raids, as well as finding partially devoured lambs in nearby woods, one farmer decided to take matters into his own hands. One night, he got a rifle, hid in the woods, and watched his henhouse. Around eleven, he saw something creeping toward the henhouse, sometimes on all fours, sometimes erect. Unable to determine what it was, the farmer, being a sensible Wisconsinite, figured he's solve the mystery by shooting it.

As the Sentinel described it, "A piercing shriek arose as of a boy of twelve years of age in terrible pain, and the object bounded off on all fours, uttering meanwhile a plaintive moan or wail, which could proceed from no animal but a human being, though the creature had seemed to run like a beast.

The next day, at first light, the farmer found blood and tracked it into a marsh. He "was startled by the appearance of an animal or being with a distinct human face looking at him from a short distance. As soon as he made movement, however, the singular creature started off with great swiftness and was soon lost to sight." In the creature's hiding place, the farmer discovered "the marks of human hands and feet, somewhat distorted . . . with enormous claws, but sufficiently displayed to remove all doubts as to the matter."

The farmer fetched the police, who, of course, didn't believe him. However, he seemed so sincere, they decided finally to check it out. They searched the swamp but found nothing. Then, just as they decided to call it a night, a rustling in the grass alerted them to a presence.

On turning, they beheld a sight which startled them. It was without question a human face, but resembled that of a brute so closely as to be almost unrecognizable as such. They made a movement as if to approach it, when it darted off, leaping like a wild cat. As it receded, they could obtain a good view of the creatures body, which was covered with hair, but at the same time appeared altogether different from that of any animal in existence. The shape resembled most closely that of a human being in the act of running or leaping on all fours. They attempted pursuit, but the creature was soon lost in the dim shades of the woods.

A tantalizing reference to a similar hairy creature appears in the History of Wood County, Wisconsin (1923) in a discussion of the Smoky Hill Mounds. Charles Brinkman, a twenty-year resident of the Sixty-acre Smoky Hill area, said that Native Americans would occasionally visit the hill to trap animals, but would not remain after dark for fear of encountering the hairy man or monster that lives there.

In January 1908, lumberjacks from the Kaiser Lumber Company in the town of Winter arose one morning to find the snow trampled by bare feet. The tracks of two bare feet from the north, circles their shanty several times, and then disappeared to the west. A letter to the editor of the local paper concluded that "the boys were curious to learn who made the tracks and why."

In June 1964, a Delavan man was nearing his home on Highway 89 after working the late shift at the Admiral Corporation. Driving on Richmond Road, he received the shock of his life as a "big hairy creature" ran into the glare of his headlights. "I first noticed him on the north side of the road, in a cornfield," the man said in a videotaped interview in 1993. "He jumped a four-and-a-half-foot fence, ran across the road, and jumped the fence on the other side. Estimated height: seven to eight feet. Estimated weight: four-hundred to five-hundred pounds." What threw the man most was that although the creature was covered with dark fur, it ran on two legs, swinging its arms like a human, and then cleared the fence without breaking a stride. "Scared the devil right out of me," he said.

There was a sighting of what is known as the Fremont Yeti on October 19, 1968, by three bow-and-arrow hunters in the Deltox Marsh near Fremont. Curiously, that same trio, along with nine other hunters, saw it for the second time on November 13 while hunting deer. Earl Boyles recalls that the hunters had stumbled out of the woods after they had "spotted this huge, hairy thing on the far side of a small clearing. It was half-ape, half-man. It was seven or eight feet tall and had long arms. [The hunters] were so amazed they never thought to take a shot at it." One of the hunters, a guy named Dick Telloch, reported that the creature "sort of danced around and then got in behind the bushes." The hunters were all consistent in their descriptions of a barrel-shaped body covered with dark hair some four inches long.

Renowned cryptozoologists Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans trekked to Wisconsin through a blizzard to visit with the men and judged their accounts to be genuine. Sanderson and Heuvelmans even joined the men in a December Yeti hunt, at which time the group found seventeen-inch tracks in the snow. However, rumors soon spread that a burly, bearded prankster masquerading in a coonskin outfit was really the source of the tracks.

[unitivemossagain]

Virga Draft 1

Last weekend I went back to my old college town. There was a concert going on, two artists I vaguely knew and halfway listened to, but I was excited nonetheless. I graduated a year early and my roommate's boyfriend was a senior, so it wasn't like I didn't go up there often.

It always feels weird, going up there again. I still know things, can drive around without a map. The dining hall workers still know my name. But things are different, too. The intersection down the hill has new pavement and planters. One upperclassmen dorm has been replaced with a grassy, fenced-off field. My best friend lives in my old bedroom.

But I have a good time. My best friend is my best friend, after all, and it is always so refreshing to see her. I have lots of friends who I miss dearly who still go there, and it is equally wonderful to see them too. I always feel so nostalgic, bittersweet going up there.

I miss it but I don't. I live in a city now, if you could even call it that. Pittsburgh, the steel city, the fastest growing tech center in the nation. Not that it really mattered to me, I was an aspiring biologist, but the concrete jungle lacked a certain charm that my college town had in spades. Everything I complained about while living there, the hills, the classes and people, the unfairness of it all, it wasn't so bad in hindsight. I missed it.

So going back, it always brings up this mess of emotions. I'm anxious and nervous one second, feeling like a cock in the henhouse the next. I am unstoppable, limitless, and one mistake away from completely failure. I have no idea what I am doing with my life.

So on Sunday afternoon at about 3:00pm, I was feeling rather dismal. The prospect of going home was exhausting, especially given that the pot at the end of the rainbow looked like a brick-and-linoleum-floor-bedroom-with-no-windows-and-no-friends-and-probably-some-bugs. And I was coming down from being stupidly high, which infected me with a sinister energy. To make matters worse, the route home was littered with severe thunderstorm warnings, and I was driving alone.

Coaxing bell boy duties and setting my destination to "Loneliest Up and Coming Tech City on the Map," I began to make my trip home in silence. It is rather peculiar for me to not listen to music, but the thought of the sound filling the car and settling in my ear drums was too much in my melancholic state. I thought of calling someone to help the time pass, but the idea of speaking at all felt similar.

So I drove in complete silence, eyes locked on the road and fighting through that post-high haze. I could feel the storms building in the air, and kept a close eye on the dark skies around me. The clouds were towering, looming, and every moment it didn't start raining felt like the one right before it did.

I thought about a lot of things while I was driving, but I mostly thought about that storm. I kept waiting and waiting for the rain to fall, for the downpour to start pouring down, but the closest I got was a brief shower about halfway through. The world seemed to hold its breath as my 2014 Chevy Sonic sped down 79.

It was like driving on a tightrope. To my left were these massive, hulking monsters in the sky, bent arms and legs of clouds clawing their way from the eye to reach the cloud shore. They were rough and tumbled, everything knotting together and pulling on itself, winding tighter and tighter and tighter. The air felt like it could be cut it you could catch it, charged and anticipating. I felt it over me in an ancient sense, the way I imagine the men on the frontlines of the armies of old felt as their enemies charged towards them.

To my right though, the sky was brilliant. It was hazy, the air holding its water in a thin sheet that covered the earth. The setting sun shone brilliantly through it, its frosty rays feeling as though they beckoned you towards them. They stretched out to the storm behind me, pulled it in and invited it closer. In some more fun, dramatic universe I imagined myself veering off the road and straight into the light, off to find whatever they where the storm was heading.

It was so strange, that drive. Being on either side of the storm, being right in the center of two true, opposing things, I felt myself split clean down the middle. I could feel which side of me was on the storm side, which side roiled and wrapped itself inside out. I could feel which side shone and reached out into nothing, could feel that hopefulness and wonder and a desire to hold on to something that was only holding on to itself.

I thought again about the old days, about days before cars and steel and cities and the weather channel. I thought about two people, my sister and I, feeling the heaviness in the air and the static in our mouths when we laughed and knowing there's a storm coming. I thought about sitting out, feeling it get closer, knowing something bigger than yourself. I thought about siting outside until just after you feel that first drop, and I thought of the mad dash we would make home, trying only a little to outrun the rain.

I don't know what it was about that drive. Maybe there was something in the air, maybe it was some sort of after high, or maybe I am a girl in her 20s searching for meaning anywhere. But I felt so lucky in that moment, like me and everyone on highway 79 were being shone something important. I spent that entire drive thinking about what it would be like to live in those clouds, both sides, to live in towering spires of storm gray clouds that thundered around you. To lounge around on ash white dew drops that held perfectly in a ray of sunshine, fade through the air like pollen on the breeze.

It mostly made me feel important. Something about being in your 20s is so jarring. Once you graduate college, your life is just like being woken up and told you're late for school, everyone is there and knows that you aren't. Everything is a game of catch-up, everyone knows more than you, and even when they don't they will make you think they do. But driving down the edge of that storm, seeing something so entirely separate from myself and yet so tied up in everything I am, I felt like I did have a place, and it was right there in the middle.

[joezworld]

Traintober Day 21

Today's Prompt: Off the rails... again!

I don't know what it says about me when I see a prompt called off the rails and immediately do 1,800 words about Bulgy before a train is even mentioned.

(Also, this happens just before the events of Day 14's story)

-

Smashing!

Bulgy is a rather disagreeable old bus on the Island of Sodor. Many years ago, he had gotten stuck underneath a bridge on Duck’s branch line, causing damage to both it and himself. As a result, his owners abandoned him in a field next to the line and the farmer who owned it used Bulgy as a henhouse!

However, this was not the end of Bulgy. Farmer Drury, his new owner, was a very successful man who owned several farms across the Island. As his business grew, he repaired Bulgy and put him back on the road as a farm transport vehicle and rolling storage bin - a duty that Bulgy hated even more than being a henhouse!

He complained bitterly about his treatment for many years, often irritating Farmer Drury in the process, and thus ensuring that he would never be anything more than a dirty work vehicle for as long as Farmer Drury owned him!

Eventually, Bulgy’s fortunes improved - although his attitude didn’t - when Farmer Drury retired and handed the business over to his son David.

David Drury had gone to school on the mainland, and unlike most Sudrians, was rather obsessed with old cars instead of old trains. He owned several classic race cars and the Island’s only Ferrari, so when he discovered Bulgy in the back of his father’s barn he was immediately taken with him. Almost before Bulgy knew what was happening, David Drury had restored him to ‘concours condition’, and he went from a dirty, dusty, and creaking work van to a pristine ‘show bus’ so fast that his eyes spun!

Now Bulgy was more or less permanently retired, living inside a nice warm garage on the outskirts of Marthwaite village. He never had to work, or get dirty, or even go out in the rain!

Except for one time…

April 13, 2015

Bulgy was startled awake by the door to his garage being thrown open. “Whassat?!” He groaned, trying to blink the sleep from his eyes.

“Come on Bulgy!” It was David, his owner. “We’ve got a sticky situation down in Hackenbeck. Let’s go!”

Far, far too quickly for Bulgy’s liking, he was started up, put into gear, and driven away. “What’s wrong?” He asked. “Where’re we going?”

“Those moro-” David started angrily, before calming himself. “I have been trying to rebuild the roof on one of the storage barns in the Hackenbeck farm for a month, and when the roofers finally show up, they didn’t check the weather, tore off the roof with no plan to finish it, and it’s going to rain this afternoon, so we need to finish the roof today or the entire harvest will be ruined!”

“Whaddya need me for?”

“The van broke down! You’re the only other big vehicle I’ve got that’s road legal!”

“You’re gonna make me work?!”

“I’m sorry Bulgy, but it’s only for today - look, I’ll make it up to you later, okay?”

Bulgy acquiesced, but grumbled all the way to Hackenbeck.

The barn was located near the railroad line, accessible by a dusty and rutted tractor path that crossed the line at one point. Bulgy grimaced as he bounced down the “road” - this was no place for a show bus - even the four wheel drive pickup trucks were complaining about the potholes, and he could feel his paintwork getting dirtier with each passing second.

It didn’t get any better after that - his owner was serious about him working, and Bulgy made five trips into town for supplies like wood planks, nails, lunch, scaffolding, and even huge buckets of tar. It was disgusting and dirty work, and he hated every minute of it - at one point, men had to stand on his roof to do work, and after that he was quite literally dirty from top to bottom.

Then the rain came.

According to the weather forecast, the real downpour wasn’t to start until later that night, but the broken clouds started to knit themselves back together as the clock struck four. The men had just enough time to hang tarpaulins over the unfinished sections of roof before the deluge started, so the grain harvest wasn’t spoiled, but everything else was soaked. Anyone who couldn’t hide in the barn took refuge inside Bulgy, and he growled as muddy boots clomped across his floors, sweaty clothes fouled his seats and dirty water dripped off of his bonnet and into his eyes. “I thought I was done with this sort o’ nonsense…”

Fortunately for Bulgy, the rain shower was short-lived, and everyone resumed work after it passed, leaving him alone for the first time since the morning.

“Oi! Mate!” Evidently he couldn’t be alone for too long, could he?

Cracking an eye open, he found a big Volvo HGV with Irish registration plates idling next to him. “Can you please bother someone else?” He asked, doing his best to be polite.

“Rude.” The lorry said before continuing on anyway. “But I’m in a bit of a pickle - ya see, I’m supposed to be in someplace called “Wellsworth”, but my GPS conked out me, see? So now I’m lost.”

“Have your driver talk to Mister Drury - it’s his farm you’re on.” Bulgy said dismissively.

“Driver?” The lorry said, before looking at Bulgy more closely. “Oh, this is one of those places.”

Then the lorry drove away, leaving Bulgy confused and feeling vaguely insulted. “Well I never...!” He said, before realizing that he probably had at some point.

“Well, s’not my problem anymore.” He said after a moment. Seeing as everyone else was occupied, he closed his eyes and tried to take a nap.

“Come on Bulgy, no rest for the weary!” David Drury said as he hopped into the driver’s seat.

“What now?”

“That lorry has gotten himself good and lost, so we’re going to show him the road into town.”

“Why’ve I got to do it? I’ll sink into the mud!”

“You’ll do it because everyone else is busy.” David said. Looking over at the other quad bikes, four-by-fours, and Land Rovers, Bulgy was forced to admit that he was the only vehicle not in use at the moment and so he bounced and juddered and sloshed along the now-muddy path towards the road.

Then there was trouble.

The railway line was on a slightly raised embankment to allow for drainage. This hadn’t been an issue before, but now the small hill leading to the tracks was nothing but slippery mud. Furthermore, the path itself was narrow, with only enough room for one vehicle to go through at a time - if two were coming in opposite directions, one of them would have to pull off to the side of the road. As they approached the crossing, an orange tractor with caterpillar treads was pulling a trailer over the line, so Bulgy and the lorry pulled over at the bottom of the hill to let him pass. As they set off, neither Bulgy, David, nor the lorry realized that the road up to the tracks was nothing but mud - the tractor had made it look easy with his treads, and didn’t say anything more than “Hello!” as he passed them. Not realizing what was about to happen, David drove Bulgy up the hill from a standing stop.

If they’d been traveling at speed, they might have made it, but when Bulgy’s front wheels bumped over the rails, his back wheels weren’t going fast enough to push him over, and he stuck fast on top of the tracks, his rear wheels spinning furiously but unable to gain any traction in the slick mud.

“Oi!” Yelled the lorry as mud pelted him. “Stoppit! Yer stuck there! Get a chain and I’ll pull ya free!”

A rummage through storage compartments in both Bulgy and the Lorry revealed that neither of them had a chain strong enough. David called back for one of his employees to send a thicker chain - they arrived on a quad bike, along with the orange tractor - who introduced himself as Terrance - and his driver.

“I say,” Terrance observed idly as the men tried to figure out where they could attach the chain without damaging Bulgy. “You picked a most inopportune time to do this - Thomas will be most upset if his passengers are delayed.”

David, Bulgy, and the lorry went very still and very pale.

“You did call the railway, didn’t you?”

“Jus’ hook that chain to anything!” Bulgy bellowed. “Get me off of here!”

“Now let’s… let’s be calm.” David sounded anything but as he poked his mobile phone urgently. “We still have time to call - all we need to do is find out what the bleeding number is!”

As it turned out, they didn’t have time.

A steam whistle sounded in the distance, putting everyone into a panic. David’s employee tore off on the quad bike, trying to stop the train before it arrived, while David and Terrance’s driver tried desperately to mount the chain. “It’s not going on! There’s no hook on this end!” They yelled.

“Get in, put him in low gear, and when I say, step on it!” The lorry ordered. David scrambled into the driver’s seat, and frantically engaged first gear.

The whistle sounded again - the noise echoing off the surrounding hills to the point where its location couldn’t be determined.

The lorry grimaced. “This is gonna suck.” He muttered, before revving his own engine. “Now!”

Bulgy’s engine roared, and mud flew everywhere. Black exhaust poured from the lorry as he engaged his low-range gearbox and charged up the incline.

With a thunderous CRUNCH he slammed into Bulgy’s rear bumper.

The whistle sounded again, this time much longer and more urgent. The quad bike must not have gotten very far, which meant that the train was close indeed.

The lorry’s wheels spun, but he revved his engine well past the red line on his tachometer as he put all of his considerable strength against Bulgy.

The train appeared from behind the trees. Terrance noted with some detached portion of his mind that it wasn’t Thomas pulling the train, but rather a big engine he’d never seen before. As soon as the engine saw Bulgy, they yelled in panic and put on their brakes, but it wasn’t going to be enough…

The lorry’s wheel dug deep enough into the thick mud to find dry dirt. With a lurch and a roar he surged forward, shoving Bulgy off of the line and onto the downhill on the other side. Seconds later, the lorry followed, his back wheels clearing the tracks in just a few seconds.

But there was still his trailer. It was a long canvas sided box trailer, fully loaded with cargo, and its wheels sank into the mud a few inches as it rolled up the hill. Those few inches were the differences between safety and disaster, and the trailer’s low-hanging side underride guards caught between the rails with a screech that brought the lorry to a standstill.

“Go!” He shouted to Bulgy as he roared his engine, trying to break free.

Bulgy needed no encouragement, and raced forwards as the train got closer and closer.

The lorry pulled so hard that the trailer’s king pin snapped in half, and he shot forwards, leaving the trailer sitting astride the train tracks.

Terrance and his driver could only watch in horror as the train got closer and closer, before…

Later

Stephen Hatt arrived at the crash site to find a much more colourful scene than he’d been expecting. “Is that… paint?” He asked the Hackenbeck stationmaster, who was acting as the incident commander.

“Yes sir. The lorry was full - over thirty tons worth.” The man said as he strategically stepped over puddles of silver and yellow that were soaking into the ground despite the best efforts of the cleanup crew. Tornado had still been going at well over thirty miles an hour when she impacted the lorry, and paint had been fired in every which way as the trailer had more or less exploded on impact. Following that, there was a two hundred foot long streak of Dulux-coated destruction leading down the trackbed as the mangled trailer had been dragged along before it came apart at the seams and was deposited along the lineside.

Then there was Tornado herself, who had collided with the trailer before it started to come apart, and had therefore been impacted by individual cans of paint, instead of a fine spray of liquid colour. As a result, her LNER green was covered from buffer to cab in huge blotches of dull green, bright yellow, metallic blue, glossy red, vibrant purple, and flat white from individual cans smashing against her. In some spots, the colors had mixed together, forming steaks of orange, brown, black, and gray that ran down her boiler in a way vaguely reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Fortunately, no one was hurt. Tornado was pulling a goods train, and despite some minor damage to her buffers and front end - miraculously, her smoke deflectors hadn’t been damaged thanks to the trailer having canvas walls - she had only derailed her leading bogie, and was actually smiling as gold paint dripped down her nose. “Well, I think I caused some confusion and delay, didn’t I?”

“Now, now,” Stephen said as he inspected her himself - the Trust was going to have a conniption as it was, so he’d better make damn sure that there was nothing seriously wrong. “I wouldn’t say you were responsible for this,” His eyes sparkled mischievously as he looked over her damaged front end. Nothing seemed to be too amiss other than the obvious, thankfully. “But I would say that you have busted your buffers.”

Tornado laughed as the rest of the breakdown crew sighed deeply.

--

It never did rain that night, (“Whaddya mean it didn’t rain?! I almost died for nuthin?” “Calm down Bulgy.” “Calm down?! Mister Drury, those blasted trains almost turned me into scrap! See, I was right! We need to rip up all the rails and turn them into nice smooth Boulevards!” “Not this again…”) and with the dry conditions, it only took Wendell and the breakdown train until midnight to finally get Tornado to the works. It was very late, and everyone was very tired, so Tornado and the cranes were already asleep when Wendell shunted them away.

Wendell was himself exhausted, and rolled into his berth at the works intent on sleeping until someone came to wake him up.

“Oi - wha’s the score with the mystery one?” Bloomer hissed from where the men had been working on him.

“I think she was at a heritage railroad for a while.” Wendell groaned as his crew set his brakes and left. “She definitely knows more about BR than any other engine I’ve met.”

“How so?”

“She knew the firing order of my engine - I think it’s safe to say that she was someplace with an archive, or the NRM has gotten very loose with their records department.”

“Huh,” Snorted Bloomer, who, like any engine that had been within earshot of Gordon in the last few years, was well aware of the NRM’s fall from grace. “Mebbe she’s just a smart egg.”

“Easter egg, more like…” Wendell yawned. “Hard boiled and painted and all; She just took a lorry’s worth of paint to the face and thought it was the highlight of her day.”

“Paint?” Bloomer peered outside of the shed doors. “Mercy me! Look at her! She’s coated!”

Wendell didn’t respond, and when Bloomer looked over, he found the diesel already fast asleep.

“Ugh, young engines these days!”

----

Several days later

The men had had their work cut out for them. The paint was latex and enamel based house paint, and it didn’t want to come off without strong solvents, the use of which also stripped off Tornado’s paint and undercoat. It took two whole days for the men to find all of the paint - it had worked its way into every crease and crevice in Tornado’s body, and if the Fat Controller hadn’t authorized copious amounts of overtime, it likely would have taken far longer.

This process was not helped by the fact that removing Tornado’s plating revealed the numerous modifications she’d received from her time in Germany - while they were safe from the paint, they weren’t safe from the deeply curious mechanical staff, who swarmed over her with cameras and notebooks, trying to determine what everything was. If it weren’t for the works manager telling them to get back to their jobs, they likely would have stayed there all day!

Eventually, the mechanical staff were shooed away, the paint was stripped off, a spot of rust on her running board was found and cleaned, the workers were able to finish, and Tornado was finally reassembled and rolled into the paint shop to be repainted into LNER green.

Except…

“We don’t have any green? On this railway?” The foreman stared at the head painter disbelievingly.

“Not this shade.” The woman said. “And somebody didn’t clear it with me before they started stripping, which means there’s none to sample, so we can’t make more.” In anticipation of a new coat, they’d decided to strip the paint off of Tornado’s tender as well. At the time it had seemed like a good idea.

“Don’t we have other greens?”

“Yes. Great Western green.” A long pause followed this. “Do you want to be the one who painted the pride of the LNER in GWR colours?”

“BR Blue?”

“Only the diesel shade of Rail Blue.”

“Henry’s Green?”

“On backorder.”

“... James' Red?”

“No.”

“Well, what do we have?”

“In sufficient quantities?” A tin of paint was produced. “This.”

“We can’t use that! They’ll think we’ve bought her!”

“Well it’s either this, or we ask the Skarloey Railway if they’ve got any of their red going spare, but considering she's bigger than all of their engines put together...”

“Okay… point made, but we’re going to have to make sure that we don’t do any of the striping or numbers - I don’t want the rest of the engines to think that we’ve bought her or anything.”

-

Tornado was actually hyperventilating as the paint shop workers buffed and polished the freshly-applied numbers and striping. She’d caught a few glimpses of herself in the mirror mounted on the far wall, and had been unable to contain herself since. “You’ve got the pictures?” She asked the head painter.

“Of course we have,” She said genially. “Now let’s get you outside for some more in the sun. Maybe we’ll even get everyone for a posed shot like they did in the twenties.”

They’d done a pressure test to make sure that nothing had been damaged in the collision, and Tornado had just enough steam left to roll into the yard under her own power.

In the yard, the midday sun was shining, the air was clear, and there were many pictures to be taken of her new paintwork. It took over an hour, and when the workers finally retreated into the sheds to work on “other jobs”, she was left alone.

“I still can’t believe it.” She said to herself quietly. “It’s like I’m really one of them.”

When the paint crew had told her they only had the NWR’s blue paint on hand, she’d been a little excited. Now that it was applied and dry, she was much more so. The red lining and gold numbers on her tender and frame completed the look, and if one ignored the smoke deflectors and squinted slightly, she could almost pass as a copy of Gordon.

Even without any steam, she could feel the excitement bubbling up through her boiler. “I’m a really useful engine you know,” She sang to herself, not really caring if anyone was listening.

“All the other engines they tell me so,

I huff and puff and whistle, rushing to and fro,

I’m the really useful engine we adore!”

She’d found the instrumentals of the song somewhere, and it quietly began playing.

“I’m the one! I’m the Really Useful Engine that we adore

I’m the one, I’m the Number One

Torna-”

“Peep Peep! Hello Fatfac- oh you’re not Gordon!” A blue tank engine had pulled alongside her.

He had six small wheels.

A short stumpy funnel.

A short stumpy boiler.

And a short stumpy dome.

“EEEP!”

[whatdoesshedotothem]

Tuesday 28 July 1840

6 35/..

10 25/..

Kouantchegkara

washed and ready at 7 25/.. – had slept well ditto ditto A- horses ordered to be here at 7 a.m. luckily not à l’heure – breakfast over and ready to be off at 9 – they brought 4 more cucumbers and a pint of milk (hardly enough for A-) and more bread – went to see the garden – cucumbers and kidney beans as usual, and dīnĭ – because last year outer rind every year like the birch – nothing like this in England – little bits sometimes peel off and one sees little patches of russet brown beneath – but no regular skin-casting as here – the house (hall) and bit of village just here in a beautifully wooded large circular recess in the hoary white high calcareous mountain with a little cleft like sillonne in the middle of back of recess, on each of 3 points of high inaccessible rock on the sides of this cleft, one on south side, 2 on north side, an old castle now all quite ruined and the road to them grown over a destroyed and at foot of lowest castle (north side) a little church – very picturesque – not time to attempt the difficult task of climbing into these castles destroyed by the Russian general (prince) Gotchakoff in the time of Prince Léon Pépianis’ father Yuri who lived in the lowest castle – the whole of the valley here as far as one can see, and after leaving district of Sardmêli last night belongs to the Pépianis, and is called Pĕpĭānŏff – prince Gregoires’ brother, David Tsirételli, archimandite of monastery of Djirootchy is still métropolitain of Mingrelia and much beloved – there is a Pépiani at St. Petersburg with the Circassian and Georgian corps there but he never writes to his family here – cousin to our young man – sons of the older brother Ottea Pépiani aet. 55 the one who entertained us his brother Lévani (Léon) aet. 45 – went from the garden to Otteas’ (Otho?) house to see the ladies who had invited us in last night – mother and her sister – aunt a widow (fathers’ sisters?) and pretty young sister of the young man, a cousin German and 2 other ladies wives of Léon and the other brother of the old set ladies Pépaini = 7 the wives of the 3 brothers all living in the same house – all well-enough dressed à la Georgienne and evidently much pleased at our visit – the wife of Ottea not the handsomest, but the most talkative and intelligent – all wore the white thing that when pulled up covers the mouth but all came to us with uncovered mouths except one of the 2 last named ladies and she uncovered at my request and they all laughed – the young man with us all the while and his 2 older brothers at the end of the gallery and went with us to Léons’ house nice not nicer than the other – wood – not quite finished – 2 large rooms galleried all round as usual – here we had the 2 old and 3 young brothers – inquired ages – thanks for their hospitality etc. and shook hands on coming away as we had done with the ladies – these 2 good wood houses and the strangers’ house (our sâcle) and kitchen and servants houses and barns and stabling etc. and henhouse like a little square log-hut necessary (but no such luxury to be found here) surrounded the court at greater or less distance – very picturesque – when they want milk or anything they send to the peasants (mujïks) – make the milk into cheese immediately before the cows are turned out again – may see it made at any of the villages – off at 10 – Adam quite blithe and [?] – the wine excellent he said and George said he (Adam) had drunk all night – would not think of his horse – Adam grinned and told me afterwards (pleased that I only laughed and joked about his wine bibbing, and George perhaps surprised) that George had drunk pretty fairly, but the Cossack neat, and not at all – (i.e. not more than necessary?) our prince gave us a good guide to go all the way to the monastery of Saïermi Dubois ii. 431. where we shall sleep

K- to Aski (river) 4 verts

A- to Pichari (village) 6

P- to Saïermi (monastery) 12?

the Aski parts the Ratcha [Racha] from the Letchekoum [Letchkum] belonging to the Dadian ii. 429. village of P- faces the gorge where the Chauri lost near Nikortsminda reappers under the name of the Charaula (Dubois ii. 429.) Shăh-răh-ōō-leĕ as pronounced by our guide – Pass below Tola with old ruined square tower at 11 25/.. – very hot but nice air, en face – at 11 35/.. ride thro’ the little clear and here 3-little-strea-Aski and fill our bottles with good water and enter Letchekoum [Letchkum], and near (right) little wine shop, and Adam [?] me a stalk (well headed) of peas little shorts pods with about 2 peas each – not (he said) the Persian pea – he had before given 2 specimens 1 of millet? 1 of [?]

Pichari and Tchekoïchi villages

at 12 ¾ at Pichari little village with little ruined square tower – stop a moment at cottage (farm house) court doors (double doors with covered head over them) and get water – everybody drinks water today – the village of Tchekoïchi (Dubois ii. 430.) highish above us (right) what are the 2 cones (on one line of jet) on the higher of which stands the picturesque whitewashed square tower, the higher calcaire crayeux, the lower (at some hundred paces distance) porphyrique? castle says Dubois ½ dismantled – full of koupchines of Dadians’ tribute wine – (vid de sa recette) – D- makes no remark on the fine combe by high bold hoary calcaire fissured wood-sprinkled, very strikingly fine – the diagram is merely an approximation from memory

a Pichari

b Tchekoïchi castle the village below on this side towards a

c when the man pointed to the gorge and cavern and Sharaoola

dd course of Rion dotted line our track

fg two lives of

gg jet or ridge that divide the combe into 4 little valleys with each its picturesque green head under the high white limestone head of combe at eee.

h fine view.

i. sort of white chalky scar below village [on] which is a little above the cavern left bank Rion thro’ which the Sharaoola escapes and runs a very little distant before falling into the RIon -

Wednesday morning 29 July 1840.  at 1 5/.. we we were winding up and away distant and above Tchekoïchi at 1 50/.. at h (near top of hill) stop to make inquires of our guide about the Sharaoola – he poined to the picturesque high white sort of scar i. and said the cavern from which the river escaped and ran a little distance, was about c. but between George and Adam anything like information is always difficult and generally impossible to be got at – Surely, we shall never have a stupider than George! – off from point h. at 2 – at 3 A- and I had eaten each a cucumber (she 1 all but bits of ends) and on the top of high plateau turned down to see in the distance (for we had now wound round in sight of the Rion again) the cavern and fall of the Sharaoola into the Rion about 1v. from the village Ooar-dēe-ăll 3 or 4v. from Pichari? – not a bit of it – returned – it seemed our poor guide did not know the road thro’ the thick young wood that surrounded the bit of open ground we stood – tried several little lanes the monastery in sight but its wondrous depths unseen – itself seeming as if almost on a level or below us – till got right at last, and at 3 ¾ began the steep descent into the bottom 3 or 4 men perched on point of monastery rock – picturesquely tremendous to see them stand watching us – steep zigzag ascent up the side of the singular mass of high monastery crowned rock – an ancient temple here? arrived at 4 10/.. – very fine [three] – an old crater? 2 high jets of calcaire the monastery, on the higher good monks received us without looking at our papier ouvert – a good wood house to ourselves with gallery for the servant – a little cabinet for A-‘s bedroom, and private gallery to private place – excellent – most comfortable – in our grand salon – good broad long divan for me, and a long wood steady table under the one little (4 about 1ft. x 7in. lights) window but room lighted by opening the doors onto our 2 galleries – very comfortable – gave our guide ./50 silver well satisfied – siding to stay till 4 p.m. tomorrow – our own good tea at 5 10/.. – nothing but rain water here drawn upon from deep reservoir with long pole and bucket but clear, and made good tea – the tea our good prince Ottea Pépiani gave us this morning for me (A- had her milk) I could not drink – offered it to George who declined on my saying and he agreeing that it was not tea and I threw it quietly down in a corner on our mud floor – making my bed comfortably and siding (dawdling over 1 thing of tidiness or another) till went out at 7 5/.. A- had been out sauntering about for ½ hour before – looked about the little island-summit – the little garden – new church and our court end of the monastery – little old church and other part, of our little village – the archimandite who had piloted A- about did the same good office for me – very civil – took me with pride to East end of the little plateau – (its length is from E. to W.) to look down upon the 2 singular tall small masses of limestone in the style of the Isle of Wright needles – very fine and picturesque – out till very dark at 8 – quite dark at 9 – or before fine starlight night at 10 – R21 ¾° and F81 ½° in our comfortable room at 9 p.m. very fine day – they brought us a fine boiled fowl and more bread and offered more wine at 8 ½ - catching fleas (brought with me) till 10 ¼

[swashbucklery]

Lena moves to ireland and buys a farm and its small and quaint on the outside and on the inside its like a fuckin bomb shelter with so much goddamn tech babygirl is prepared for the next crossover event

Anon, I see the bit you’re going for and like. It’s on brand, you’re right, canonically that’s probably what would happen and it would be a good sight gag.

But I would actually love to raise you: it’s literally just a farm.

Like. The thing I am genuinely interested in is what happens when Lena sits down with herself, makes a cup of tea and has to really answer the question: who is she if she’s not reacting to the Luthors? And the answer I think in a lot of ways is, that’s a good question. 

So to riff off of your idea, I’d like to propose: Lena buys a farm in Ireland and it’s this got this big, drafty stone house attached to it. She renovates it room by room all by herself and the whole time she does it, she thinks. She does the demolition by hand, buys a sledgehammer and hauls the plaster and old insulation out all on her own and at the end of the first day her body feels like it’s on fire but in the best possible way. She draws up plans, uses her tablet to make sketches room by room and budgets out floor tile, drywall, appliances. She rents a dumpster and a little camper van to sleep in while she does the major stuff; furniture can come later and that’s alright.

She teaches herself how to redo the wiring in the kitchen and hires a grouchy old man to double-check her work on the plumbing and when he makes fun of her for installing a part backwards she takes it and learns from it because she’s working on not having to be the smartest person in the room anymore.

Lena teaching herself how to install drywall; she has to redo the living room three times because she rushes it but the fourth time she’s patient in just the right way and it pays off.

Lena having to walk down the road and ask her neighbour for some hot water and directions to a good bakery, the week that she’s in the middle of redoing the kitchen and she breaks a part she needs to install the range.

(Lena not really knowing how to act when the neighbour calls her sweetie and gives her a thermos full of milky tea and a slice of thick-cut fresh bread with butter and jam. Lena resisting that instinct to explain that she’s not used to people treating her like this because she’s a Luthor because: she’s not. She doesn’t have to be. She’s just Lena and that’s alright.) 

Lena dealing with the private heartbreak of the night that a fox really does get into the henhouse and she loses her first chicken and she shouldn’t be angry and sad but also: it’s fine if she is. She’s allowed to feel just as angry and sad as she wants to and nobody is here to judge her for it.

Lena wearing oversized knitted sweaters and the same two pairs of increasingly paint-splattered jeans and workboots and it’s amazing how her calves don’t get sore at the end of a long day, anymore. How her feet and hands develop calluses and blisters and at some point she learns to let go of the worry that somebody will see her nails, unpolished and unmanicured, and think that she’s lesser for it.

Lena slowly and quietly rebuilding that house piece by piece and it takes her the better part of six months but at the end of it, she’s grown and she can say with certainty that she has a thing that’s truly hers.

(And Lena staying in touch with the Superfriends but also: learning to help in a way that’s not just throwing tech at the problem or throwing out the first answer that comes to mind. She takes an introductory ethics course online and Brainy teases her about it at first but honestly one of them has to, you know?)

(Kara learns how to knit and she makes Lena a wobbly hat but it’s so thick and so warm and Lena wears it until it falls apart.)

(Lena teaches herself to make scones and the first batch are so bad that only Kara can eat them; she muscles her way through half a batch before Lena tells her to stop. Will sending Lena his best recipes, Lena trying them and practicing until she gets better.)

Like, I was kind of only half-serious before but the more I think about this the more I’m super serious like maybe after all this she does go to grad school and she does something with absolutely no money and no prestige but she loves the field. Like. Lena inventing a car that runs on garbage using all sustainable parts that can be infinitely repaired, Lena developing solar panels that don’t require rare earth metals, Lena developing scalable textile processes that can be fully reclaimed without using new water. Lena developing things that aren’t lucrative but that really genuinely can change the world, quietly selling patents and really understanding that like. The goal is to sell it to someone who’s going to make the world better properly, not whoever’s going to make it big the fastest or help her reputation the most.

[whumpster-fire]

Athanasia Part 1: The Creature In the Cage

Re-posting this story that started out as a Whumptober 2020 entry because I’ve made a few edits and also I have more content for this OC planned so I want to give her a proper re-introduction.

The character featured here is Tansy, currently anonymous because she hasn’t gotten her name yet in-universe. Link to her refsheet here

CONTENT WARNINGS: Monster whumpee, Animal Whump, Animal Cruelty, Animal Death Mention, Mention of predators being predators, Gore, Infected Wounds, Vomit

The cage is much too small for the little creature trapped inside it. Much too small to leave her in it this long, at least. How long has it been? She doesn’t know anymore, but it has been many, many days, and many, many nights. She is not sure she remembers what grass feels like anymore. It is just barely big enough to turn around in, but she cannot sit up without hitting her head on the ceiling, or stretch her tail out. It is far too small to pace back and forth from one end to the other like she could in the last cage. Her legs are weak from lack of use.

The first night she came to the village, she only hunted the rats and mice and other small vermin. She looked longingly into the windows of the houses, wishing she could be in there with the warmth. But the people didn’t want her. They threw her out long ago. It seemed like the family had loved her at first, but then the preacher told them what she was, and they got rid of her. She came back to the old village once, to see if the children had grown, but a plague had swept across the land and everybody had either left or joined the pits of bones.

For a long time she lived out in the woods, in the wild, but there was less of it with every turn of the seasons, and something drew her to the new village, with its cobbled main street and windows of real glass in the houses, and she thought she could live in humanity’s shadow again.

But the people hadn’t changed. Not at all. She lived off the mice and rats for a while, but one day the hunting horns sounded and hooves thundered and hounds bayed. She wasn’t what the men were looking for, but they set the dogs on her all the same, chasing her down and digging out her burrow and tearing and biting until there was nothing but scraps of fur and bone, which they left in a ditch to rot.

The next night the creature came to the village, she left the mice and rats alone. Let them eat the people’s grain and spread disease among them, she thought. If they hated her, hunted her for sport, then  why should she help them? That night, she went to the henhouse, and she came again every night for a fortnight until the dogs caught her. The people hunted her down again, and chased her up a tree. A man brought out a new weapon that hadn’t existed when she first knew the people, an iron tube that exploded with fire and smoke, and knocked her from the tree. They took her back to the village by force, and strung her up on a gamekeeper’s gibbet with the rotting carcasses of the foxes and stoats and all the other creatures they called vermin.

The night after she chewed through the wires binding her, the creature came to the henhouse again. She ate her fill, and then painted the walls with blood. She left the village alone after that. She didn’t want anything to do with the people anymore. But they hunted her, they searched for weeks before they finally caught her. And they must have figured out that there was only one of her, because that was when they put her in the cage.

She has been in the cage for a long time now. She was a curiosity to them at first, but they never loved her. At first it amused them to hurt her, to shoot her or drown her or build a fire under the cage, but now she is only a nuisance. They moved the cage out of the cellar to the barn after her screeching kept them up at night,  and out of there too when she frightened the horses. So they put her in this smaller cage, barely big enough to turn around in. She hangs from a post in the town square, which is really on the edge of the village by the old dirt road leading to other places. The grass is so close, just a man’s height below her, but she can never reach it.

She cannot get out. She cannot get out. The cage is rusty, but the iron bars are thick, and she has broken her teeth and claws trying to gnaw through them. Her paws are always bloody and scabbed from the rough iron under them. She has been out here for so long, with nowhere to hide from the rain and the cold and the heat of the sun.

People used to come by and feed the creature in the cage and give her water, but they have fed her less and less as time went on. It has been many days since anyone has bothered to do it at all. Her body is weak from starvation. Her ribs stick out, and her skin is loose on her bones. Her coat is dull, and the fur is matted with grime: blood, and the rotten fruit and eggs visitors sometimes throw, and the dust and dirt kicked up from the road, and rust from the bars above her, and the many, many times she has been sick in the cage. It falls through the bars of the floor, but they still get dirty, and there is nowhere else to lie.

The people she hates most are the children. The adults have mostly stopped paying attention to her, except when they are drunk, which is admittedly quite often. But the children think it is funny to poke her with sticks through the bars, or rattle her cage around so it sways, or tease her by holding food just out of her reach. The gaps in the bars are just big enough to fit her paws through, and many days ago she clawed angrily at one of the boys and cut his finger. But he dropped the piece of meat he was taunting her with, and he hit her foreleg with a heavy stick before she could get it back through the bars.

That leg is broken now. It was broken so badly the bone came out through the skin, and she is so weak and hungry that it hasn’t healed. Instead, it is slowly rotting. For many days there has been another cage nearby with a man in it, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to die by being hung in the cage and not fed. For a while he was company, and tried to talk to her. But many days ago he died, and the creature in the cage envies him for it. His rotting body has driven most of the people from the square with its stench, but she cannot get away from it. It has brought more company in the form of kites and crows that pick at his flesh. They try to pick at hers too, but their beaks cannot reach through the bars, except for small wounds they have given her. The body has also brought swarms of flies, buzzing and biting and laying eggs in the creature’s wounds, including where her leg is broken. There is no way to escape from the cruel maggots in the tiny cage. But they are the only thing she has eaten for a long, long time.

Today, they took the dead man away. He was little more than bones and dried-out skin anyway. It is not night yet, but the sky is dark. Thunder rolls and lightning flashes. The creature cowers in her cage, her little heart racing. She has always been afraid of lightning, and there is no escape from it. She flinches with every bolt, afraid it will strike the gibbet. No one is outside in the village but her.

Rain pours down, finally washing her fur. She wants to be clean again, but it is so cold, so terribly cruelly cold. There is nowhere in the cage to get away from the driving rain, and she is soaked to the skin. She wants to drink the rain, because she has had no water for days, but she is shivering, so hard her teeth clatter together, and she is afraid she will bite her tongue and it won’t heal. The shivering is taking all her strength. She curls into a sodden ball of fur, whimpering and begging the storm to go away. The howling wind makes the cage sway violently, tossing her around inside it and beating her against the bars. Lightning flashes off the church steeple, so close that her ears ring.

The wind gets worse, and worse. The rain is going sideways now. The cage sways, and the gibbet creaks. Then, suddenly, it gives way. The cage is falling, and she is falling with it. She splays her paws out and braces herself for the landing. But one of her paws goes through the bars in the cage, and it snaps.

She is hurt, she is broken, but so is the cage. The heavy wooden beam of the gibbet has fallen on it and smashed the iron bars open, nearly crushing her. Freedom is so close. She drags herself through the gap which is really too narrow for her, crying out as the jagged edges catch and tear her skin. She collapses onto the ground, but there is no grass under her. There is only the cold, deep mud the heavy rain has turned the dirt road into. She drags herself through the mud for a few paces, but that is all her starved body can manage before her strength fails her. All she can do is keep shivering, and breathing, and holding her head out of the mud and rainwater, but even those will not last long.

The creature waits for death to claim her there in the cold mud. But then, she hears heavy boots splashing in the puddles, slowly getting closer. She looks up, astonished. Someone is out here after all. A figure in a cloak stands over her, sheltering his lantern from the wind. It is dim, but lightning flashes and illuminates a weathered, bearded face lined with confusion, then sympathy. Pity. He reaches down. The creature hisses, and screams, and snaps at his wool glove. What would a human ever do but hurt her?

“What in God’s Green Earth are you?” the traveler wonders aloud. Then: “What in hellfire did they do to you?”

Lightning flashes again. The wind puts out the man’s lantern as he reaches for her again, but his eyes glow with their own yellow light.

Just like hers.

The creature that was in the cage begins to cry, but she doesn’t stop the traveler from picking her up and bundling her into his cloak. She just shivers, and cries against his chest, pressing herself into the first warmth she has known for many, many years.

[mybrothershands]

Would be very interested to read about the spoon incident...If you ever feel like writing it?

as you wish~

(sorry if this posts as one long blurb, I cant quite figure out how to make the Keep Reading tab work for those on the app)

"I'm just afraid he'll hurt someone," they would whisper in the streets. He tried not to let it bother him as he carried his drunken caretaker back from the tavern yet again. Maybe the people thought he could not understand them. Maybe that was it.

"Cairo," asked the boy as he knelt beside the man's doorstep in the dark. His voice was thick with lilt as he formed the question, "Why did you take me in?"

The man stared up at the boy, his head flush as he stumbled backwards onto the ground. He smelled of spirits, and his beard was sticky with mead. Though his eyes still seemed kind, his words flowed too easily, as if the gatekeeper had fallen asleep. "Because you're useful, Ka," Cairo had said. He then left into his house where the boy could not follow.

Even though the words said had been in the kindest tone, sweet as honey wine, they still felt rank as they slipped into the young giant's ears. He remained knelt by the doorway for several moments, eyes distant, before he got up and made his way back to the barn he called home. At least he could be alone there. He rubbed his arm against the cold as chained dogs barked at him. To be alone… yes, that was what he needed.

The boy rolled back the big barn door, revealing a few changes of clothes folded atop old hay, a single plate with one each of fork, spoon, and blunt knife, and a burlap blanket was draped over a stack of hay bales. In the corner lay a few logs, each at various stages of being whittled into crude animal shapes. He was in the process of taking his shoes off when he heard a knock against the wall. In the bay was a man on horseback. The farmer.

"The sun is not up yet, sir," said the giant, as best he could.

The buckskin fidgeted under the saddle, but did not move. The rider had his whip today. "Don't argue with me, boy. If you want to eat tonight, you'll work today. Now get your sorry self up," said the old man as he backed the horse away and started down the road at a canter.

After he had his shoe back on, the boy stood, left the barn, and followed at an easy pace. A few miles later, they came to a field, edged in forests. The two skirted around the edges until they came to the very back, where trees and rocks lay piled up on one side from the day before. Drawing his horse around, the man stopped near a stack of oak logs. "I want two sections cleared off- rocks, roots and all. That brushpile needs burned, too. No excuses."

Ka clenched his jaw, but did not argue. Arguing meant more work, so kept his mouth shut and took up his hatchet. By mid-morning his stomach growled, but after noon it grew quiet- replaced with a dull anger and a muffled ache in his back. A tree felled on his knee, a stone dropped on his toe, a branch jabbed him in the eye, it just seemed he could not focus. When the farmer returned to find him sitting down, he gave him a third task of lopping branches. Though the boy did his best to comply with the nit-picking, it wore on him like a blister.

No sooner had the man left than Ka started mumbling to himself as he hacked at a stubborn root. He worked until dusk, then returned home- throat raw, hands bloody, and body aching to find Cairo waiting for him atop a stack of hay bales with a lamp in his hand. The giant glared at him. "What do you want?"

Cairo shrugged, "To see you. You've been gone all day," he said. With a sigh, Ka took a seat, angled pointedly away from the man, who cocked his head. "What, are you not talking today? What's the matter?"

"You want to guess?" he sneered. his face was hard as he cast a glare back at the man, who blinked in surprise.

"What did I-" He stopped himself, seeming to remember something, and thought for a moment. "Did I… I didn't say something while I was drunk, did I?"

Ka was silent.

Cairo got up, lamp in hand, and walked over the row of hay bales towards him. "Look, I don't know what I said, but-" He sighed, staring up at the back of the boy's head. "Lempkins brought your dinner over."

He glanced over to his plate, piled with oatmeal and a few dozen apples. Horse food, Ka thought. "I'm not hungry."

"Yes, you are, you haven't eaten all day," the man quipped. He watched Ka cross his arms and then slur something in his native tongue. Cairo set his lamp down roughly and stood up straight. "Look, I don't know what happened, but I'm not going to have you acting like this."

"Or what? You'll kick me out?" Ka snapped. "You're not my father. Don't tell me what to do."

Cairo rubbed his face then pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm not going to kick you out, Ka," he groaned.

"I know you won't. You won't because I'm useful. Useful for taking you home from the bar at night and saving you every time you get into a fight. Meanwhile I don't even have a proper bed to sleep in- or a blanket for that matter," he said as he grabbed the burlap blanket and pitched it across the room, surprising even himself that he had done it. What was worse was it made him mad that he had not restrained himself. He probably looked like some kid throwing a tantrum right now.

Cario approached the boy, grabbing his sleeve. "Now you quit throwing things and calm down! Tell me who told you that," he demanded. At once the giant turned and swore at him again, ranting in words he did not understand. The human glared up at him even as the voice came in roars, then spread his arms and curled his lip. "What is wrong with you today?"

It was then Ka grabbed the spoon, a metal one with a wooden handle. He pointed it in Cairo's face. "You are what's wrong. All you care about is yourself and your liquor. I thought you were my friend."

The man stared up at him, stunned for once. He brushed the utensil aside. "What did I do? Who told you all this?" Though he tried to mask it, there was a trace of a quiver in his voice. Still, he stood his ground.

"Oh, what, you're afraid too, now? Like everyone else in this stupid town?"

Cairo shook his head, then turned to leave. "No, you're out of control. You won't talk to me, you're throwing things, and you're acting a fool," he growled as he picked up his lamp. "I'll be back tomorrow."

"So you are scared," Ka sneered.

The human wheeled around, spread his arms, and flipped his hands. "You want to fight? Okay, we'll fight!" He bellowed. He took his lamp and pitched it at him, breaking the glass against his shoulder.

Ka let out a yelp. Brushing out the flames, the glass dug deeper into his skin. Even in the dark, he could tell Cairo had not given up his ground, arms still spread in an aggressive stance. They sat there for a moment, neither one moved. Ka gripped the spoon handle tighter. At last Cairo spoke up. "You see? Not afr-"

The next thing Ka knew, the man was folded up on the hay, and he was drawing his hand away with the spoon still in it. Certain it had not been that bad, Ka crossed his arms and looked away. The boy felt something rising in his throat, and swallowed hard. He would not cry. Not over someone who saw him as a tool. It was several good moments before he Cairo make a noise.

"Shut up, I did not hit you that hard," he said under his breath, still looking pointedly away. The barn grew silent, save for the sounds of night creatures as their howls floated in through the open barn door. He brushed some of the glass off his shirt, feeling a wet spot where the oil had gotten on it, and then brushed that off of his hands by running it over his pants. It did not stick into his palms. They had become leathery and rough since he had started clearing land for Lempkins. He glanced over to find Cairo still curled up on the hay.

"Quit being so dramatic and get up," Ka growled, setting the spoon back up on the plate. He took a single apple and popped it in his mouth, determined not to worry. When he could stand it no longer, he turned around. The boy had not really intended to touch him, but picked the man up anyway, holding him in a fist. "I said get u-"

His voice died in his throat as he felt tiny crinkles against his palm where ribs should be. The human tried to cry out, but it ended in a twisted squeak as the pain reached his lungs. Every ounce of anger Ka had had in him was replaced with raw, unadulterated fear as the man kicked and beat feebly against his fingers. Cairo never struggled. Not ever.

Ka brought his other hand up and laid the man out flat in his palms as he stared, not quite understanding. He felt his body grow weak, then start to shake. What have I done?

He got to his feet and bolted out the door, rounded the side of the barn, and pounded up the street. The few who were still about dove out of the way. A toddler screamed for her mother. A dog ran under a henhouse with its tail tucked. Men grabbed their wives and children and ushered them inside. They were right about him; they had been right all along.

At last he fell to his knees beside a two-story home, one with a fire still alight inside. "Doctor Baker?" the boy called inside. His hands were too preoccupied to knock on the door. He called again, "Doctor Baker!" He heard a shuffling inside, a thump, and then a woman's talking voice, shrill with worry.

It was then he felt a shuffling in his palms, and looked down to find the human staring up at him. He did not seem angry nor afraid. In fact it was hard to tell what he was feeling at all.

Ka's hands were beginning to shake now, and he steadied them on his lap. "I'm… I am..." He searched for the word as tears began to well. He shook his head. "Tha mi duilich."

The second story window opened, and a man of about twenty-five stuck his head out, his day clothes still on. Dr. Baker glared up at him at first, about to snap, when he saw the fear on Ka's face. The man paused a moment and then ducked back inside without a word. In a moment, the door opened, but only a head peaked out. "What happened?" he said, not daring to take a step further.

"I hurt him, sir…" he said, his breath shaking as he held out his hands. "I- I hurt him bad."

[oxtoxtoxto]

Kara Danvers: Ornithologist

Ao3 Mirror

(tags): Supercorp, Ornithology, Fluff, One-Shot

It all started about a year after she had landed on earth.

By that time, Kara had, at least in her own opinion, grown moderately used to the effects of a yellow sun. People, social norms, fitting in—those would take more time to come to her, to chip away at what humanity saw as being socially stilted, but had been in her memories just how people acted. Still, she’d figured out the whole strength thing, had stopped randomly floating at inopportune times, was steadily working her way through weekly nightmares, and she felt, for the first time since she’d watched Krypton blast apart into chunks behind her, like she was making progress, that she had finally found some sort of equilibrium.

Which, of course, meant that the world had to drop something else into her lap.

Now, let it be said, Kara knew that wild animals were not, in fact, harmless, even despite her immense durability. They might not be able to harm her, but the chaos they could cause - and more to the point, the damage they could cause to other people - was significant. She knew that, okay? She’d had it drilled into her head repeatedly by Eliza and Alex - who she was finally getting along with after all this time - and, just. She wasn’t careless.

The duck was an accident.

She’d been out on one of her nature walks at the time, the handful of hours she graced herself with whenever the world got too... restrictive. Memories of the pod still weighed on her head like a leaded blanket and every once and a while even the house felt a little too enclosed. She’d spend her time tracing the trails walked by others, glancing up at the sky, wearing whatever she wanted, moving at her own pace, to her own whims.

There was a body of water somewhere between a pond and a lake further into the woods surrounding her home. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a lake, nor was it small and shallow enough to justify calling a pond. It was just barely deep enough that the average-sized adult - using Eliza as a reference point, anyway - would have trouble keeping their head above water at the deepest, and it stretched out across the uneven forest floor for some distance, tucked away into the side of a few rolling hills.

It was a favourite of hers, mostly because it was a hotspot for birds. She hadn’t expected to find any when she’d arrived, admittedly, it was winter and most of the birds had fled further south outside of the ones who stayed year-round. The occasional chickadee, a handful of crows—not exactly social demographics, for sure, but it hadn’t stopped her from watching and enjoying the sight of fluffy, black-feathered birds hop and gutturally scream at one another over a discarded tin can.

Except, what she found wasn’t crows or wintering birds or even the random occurrence of other wildlife, like squirrels.

She found a duck. A duck not twenty paces from the body of water, one wing bent at an unspeakable angle, letting out little noises of pain. It kept trying to waddle its way towards the body of water, but would falter, one of its flippers always giving out on it. It’d likely hit something mid-flight, she even could recognize some damage to a nearby tree, where pine needles had been stripped away from something hitting it hard, and the ground nearest to the tree was scuffed, thrown up around the edges, frostbitten lichen scraped away due to an impact.

For a moment, she couldn’t help but just kinda... watch it. There was no real justification for it then, to let something suffer and attempt to meander its way over to the body of water, to stand there, stock-still and unsure, as something else tried to overcome its pain. Do nothing to help it.

Then, she took a step forward.

The duck’s head snapped around to her, a croaky warning quack bubbling in the back of its beak, edged by more pain. Its feathers fluffed, its body tightened, it looked all the world both terrified and intensely hostile. It did not want her there, it did not want her help, if anything it actively could not imagine taking it.

So what compelled her to take another step, and then another, ignoring the increasingly intense noises of warning from the waterfowl, was frankly completely and utterly beyond her.

Before she really knew what she was doing, Kara had closed the distance between herself and the duck and had crouched down, despite all warnings, despite not knowing how to actually tend to a duck. Even though it was wild, even though it clearly really hated her and despite every last warning Eliza had made her repeat like a mantra, she couldn’t help herself.

The duck was wounded. That, simply, would not do.

    “Kara,” Eliza said the word with unhidden exhaustion.

Jeremiah, hand pressed over his mouth and shoulders shuddering with restrained mirth, stood beside her.

Alex was, of course, up in her room, completely unaware.

“She’s hurt,” Kara explained, the duck tucked against her mud-soaked shirt. She’d figured out that the duck had been a girl sometime during the period where it had repeatedly tried to maul her, to little effect. It had taken two hours of persistent cajoling, but at this point the duck was mostly sedate.

That or resigned, she couldn’t really tell.

“Yes, honey,” Eliza tried again, this time her voice going for soothing. “But sometimes animals get hurt, you can’t just take every hurt animal in.”

Kara stared blankly ahead. “Of course I can’t.” That was obvious, thank-you-very-much. She knew she couldn’t house every last animal, okay? “But this one?”

“It does seem pretty docile,” Jeremiah said, considering.

Eliza snapped her head around to him, a look of betrayal on her features. “It’s wild, Jer!” She hissed right back, as though Kara wasn’t here and didn’t have enhanced hearing abilities and could literally hear what they were saying.

“We tamed wild wolves,” Jeremiah tried, again.

Eliza threw her arms up. “As newborns! That’s a fully grown duck!”

The duck in question, name still to be decided, quacked tiredly.

Jeremiah’s smile broadened, almost teasingly. “And yet, it seems to be handling Kara well.”

Eliza stared daggers at her husband for a while, bringing to mind vivid memories of the time she’d caught her own mom reaming her father for eating the last off-world cookies they’d brought back on one of their trips. After a moment, she glanced back at the duck, then to Jeremiah, before huffing. “Fine, but if that so much as tries to bite one of us, I am going to cook it.”

And that was, in the end, how Kara ended up spending the remainder of winter break putting a duck house together with Jeremiah.

    Sally - the duck, name decided on by Alex in a moment of frustration when Kara hadn’t been able to figure one out, and it had just kinda stuck - outlived Jeremiah by a year.

Both deaths had been crushing, and so had the things that followed it. Alex pulled away again, Eliza was overcome by grief, the house grew a bit too quiet, a bit impersonal over the year after Jeremiah’s death.

She took to walking the trail over and over again after Sally died, not entirely sure what to do with herself. Sally hadn’t ever quite acclimated to being house-bound, but at the same time, in hindsight, she hadn’t had much of a choice, either. Her wing had been broken in all the wrong ways, it would never be fully operable again, and eventually Kara was pretty sure she had come to see the small little region of the backyard they’d fenced off for her as her own.

Kara got better, in her own opinion, at social things—at blending in, for lack of a better term. She didn’t make any new friends, and going into high school hadn’t brought any new changes with it either. Midvale was a small town, affluent, yes, but very, very small. Everyone who went to middle school went to high school together, and her reputation carried, however unfortunate that might be.

She made a friend in Kenny Li.

Lost a friend, just like Jeremiah, just like Sally.

It was not long after that, tracing that same old trail, that an impulse overcame her. An impulse she hadn’t had in a while, but an impulse nevertheless. She knew better than to feed into it, knew better than to consider it, but it’d always been there, floating in the back of her head like an intrusive thought. She had just been in a better place to overcome it.

Her steps took her out of the forest, down the long, winding sidewalk into the actual city, up the road, to the right, and up to one of the farming retailers. She walked in, mud-caked shoes and all, ignored the odd looks she was getting from the cashier, and very, very firmly asked for a baby chicken.

When asked why, she told them it was for school.

They believed her.

    Clucks was a considerably easier venture to handle. Eliza hadn’t made a comment on it, and Alex was too busy getting into fights with Vicki Donahue to pay any attention to her. She was pretty sure Eliza didn’t approve, especially not after she spent a lot of time and a solid 90% of her “savings” - however much that can mean anything when you’re getting an allowance - to retrofit the waterlogged duck house into a proper henhouse, but the occasional bag of feed would randomly pop up, and Eliza’s silence was, in a way, itself its own form of permission.

Watching Clucks grow, however cliche, felt like it... unlocked something in her, for lack of a better term. The process of biological growth, the sleepy blinking eyes, the little calls she made—it made her curious. She hadn’t been curious in years, not since Krypton, not since she was slated to join the Science Guild and all that entailed. Earth was, for better or for worse, strictly speaking completely and utterly behind her for the most part. Her advantage would probably wean off if she followed scientific education into college, to be fair, you can only teach a child so much in so many hours, but she didn’t really have to try at school - hadn’t had to try at anything, really, outside of social situations and look where that had gotten her - in a very long time.

She started watching birds, more than she normally did. She’d spend the hours she wasn’t beholden to caring for Clucks and her fussy eating habits staring at them in the trees, keeping a record of them in her notebook, sketching them. Doing everything in her power to look them up, find out what made one bird different from the other, even if they looked very similar. Christmas that year netted her a high-quality camera and a small collection of encyclopedias specifically for avians.

To be completely honest, that was about the point where her fascination with birds turned into a passion.

    “What do you want to do?” Mrs. Hubbard, the guidance counsellor, finally asked.

Kara stared back, completely and utterly not sure how to respond to that. It was her last year at high school, she could do more or less anything she wanted outside of maybe history and English literature. Those were places where her interstellar knowledge could do her precisely nothing to aid and she was almost always too busy looking after Clucks, having aged to the point where it was starting to become necessary, or looking for new birds, photographing them, adding them to a wall.

Instead of vocalizing any of that, Kara shrugged.

Mrs. Hubbard frowned, a thoughtful expression slipping over her features shortly after. She spun in her computer chair, reaching down to one of the drawers on her desk and, with a few short tugs and some rummaging, pulled out the local newspaper.

On it was one of her photos. One that Alex had sent in after she had refused to do so. It was of a red-crested cardinal, very rare in this part of the continent, almost unheard of, really. They didn’t like people, but she had spent the majority of an entire day lying in wait until she could get just the right perfect shot. It had come out really good, in her opinion.

“You took this, right?” Mrs. Hubbard asked, flicking through the scant few pages that made up the school’s newspaper. “You said you had an interest in birds, what about that?”

Kara shrugged. Again.

“Just, please consider it?” Mrs. Hubbard tried, and Kara forced a reassuring smile to her face to give the woman some room to breathe. She was fifty-going-on-sixty, with a head of curly gray hair and a perpetual wrinkly cast to her face. Kara was sometimes worried she’d fall over at any time, frail-looking enough to be daunted by a weak breeze.

“Alright.”

    She got into National City University almost accidentally, really. She’d sent out applications more or less to wherever they would fit, throwing Mrs. Hubbard’s idea at the wall to see if it would stick.

Turns out, National City University, alongside a relatively well-known arts and marketing department, and its regularly-lauded bio-engineering course, had courses for ornithology. Well, more specifically, she was accepted for a Bachelor’s in Wildlife Biology and intended, as far as Eliza had helped her plan, to get a Master’s - and possibly, eventually, a Ph.D. - with an emphasis on ornithology.

She got in on a scholarship too, which was nice. Her own scientific background was starting to come up a bit empty, though, too many things that humans hadn’t quite figured out yet combined with gaps that would’ve been filled, had she continued her career on Krypton. Still, it said something that she could think about Krypton nowadays without that pervasive ache, that emptiness that drove her to walk in circles on a muddy path until her head would stop being so noisy.

Clucks died the summer leading into her university admission. She took apart the henhouse and buried her with it out back, capped by a small stone that only she, Eliza, and to some extent Alex knew the importance of. It wasn’t much, but it felt... nice, final, like putting everything to rest after all this time.

Alex had been, admittedly, less than impressed she was following her to National City, but then Alex wasn’t impressed with her a whole lot lately. She spent a lot of time out partying, she’d heard the yelling matches - albeit from a distance - that Eliza and Alex had spiralled into as of late. So she just took her opinion into account, acknowledged it, but did precisely nothing more with it, primarily because she wasn’t well-equipped to deal with Eliza’s constant pressuring of Alex or Alex’s habitual need to prove herself.

At least this time she didn’t buy a bird.

    That was a lie. She bought another bird.

Well, not bought. Found might be more operative, really. A pigeon’s egg that had been haphazardly left on her dorm’s windowsill like a gift from an outside influence. The dorm had, with the exclusion of medical aid animals, a wholesale ban on pets. Understandable, if anything it made a whole lot of sense not to trust university students with pets like cats or dogs because not long after you’d probably find out you’ve made an entirely new ecosystem just in the dorm buildings alone.

That, however, did not stop her from keeping it. Or incubating it. Or getting special permission from one of her teachers who really liked her to play the entire thing off as a long-term project towards her study of how city-dwelling has modified the behaviours and physiology of native bird species in the region.

It technically wasn’t a pet if it was a project, and all that.

Thank god she didn’t have a roommate. She wasn’t great at lying but she was pretty sure it would not hold up in the face of someone who was around her for any length of time.

Cook, the male pigeon she was now rearing, was docile, fat and the laziest bird she had ever met. It was fascinating, but also very very nice. Cook was really the first bird which let her touch them, brush her fingers over their crest, observe their talons and all the other fun things. She hadn’t known how to properly handle Sally back when she first got her, and by the time she had, Sally was old and holding her would only ever end up with her thrashing, so it wasn’t safe. Clucks was better about it, but had been a notoriously flighty hen with snappish tendencies that had made physical contact largely impossible.

Cook was the equivalent of a male ginger cat: spoiled rotten, but too lazy to be particularly rotten.

Birds served to be something of a perpetually rotating door of new and interesting things. Kryptonian birds, aside from being extinct for hundreds of years due to core mining destabilizing their cliff habitats, were only abstractly similar. They were both feathered, both laid eggs, but Kryptonian birds, for starters, did not have gizzards. She wasn’t sure why - though, her guess was that it was because after a certain point there weren’t really any rocks the birds could eat that weren’t also poisonous - but they just didn’t, and finding out that birds ate rocks to grind food up had been absolutely one of the highlights of her youth.

The worn pages of her encyclopedia could attest to that.

Just, gizzards. How could something like that even evolve? She wanted to find out, wanted to know, and she did everything in her power to find it out. She read papers, did research, she had avenues open to explore all those questions that high school science teachers couldn’t answer, or things which only had theories and weren’t taught as a direct consequence. It was like being a fish in a pond for her.

She didn’t even realize she was reaching the end of her Bachelor’s until someone brought the fact up to her.

    “I want you to try for this,” Professor Vance said, sliding the slip of paper over to her.

Curious, Kara plucked it by one edge and brought it up. At the very top, ‘CATCO WORLDWIDE MEDIA’ was written in a huge, distinct font, and below that was a rather blunt four paragraphs on the new nature magazine they were working on. They were looking for prospective photographers and scientists to apply for a chance to be hired or at least interned for a promised three editions at the minimum, with more if the magazine’s profit margins were high enough.

Kara glanced back up.

Professor Vance smiled. “You’re nearing the point where you have to start looking for experience work, right? I mean, keeping your grades as they are will keep you in a scholarship if you want to just move straight to your Master’s, but I’d really prefer it if you considered this. I’m friends with one of the people who pushed for this, she promised she’d give your work a look if you sent it in after I showed her a few of the pictures you left me with of Cook.”

This was... definitely an option, for sure. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do it, but the fact that she could get in on the ground for something like this, that it was there, that there was no real harm in trying - after all, despite the rule about not being involved with newspapers or the news in general, this didn’t technically qualify, did it? - for better or for worse. She wanted to try, wanted to do something, wanted to explore more and maybe have the way she saw the world be something other people could empathize with, or even understand.

She thought back to the newspaper for a moment, to how it had put her here in the first place. After waffling so much on what she wanted to do, on where she wanted to go, to find out that the option of taking up this line of study had been such a smart option, one that had been so fulfilling, well.

It felt like a sign.

She just hoped to Rao it wasn’t an omen.

    She had learned, maybe in her second year at NCU, that most of her wardrobe was not going to work with the outdoor labs and observation studies that had become part of her life. She’d, with great reluctance, shucked her fondly-loved pastels for a wardrobe mostly consisting of heavy-duty and androgynous clothing. A lot of durable pants, a lot of t-shirts, few skirts, more shorts than anyone had any right to own, boots. So many boots.

Which, as it would happen, is not the type of wardrobe you should be wearing in the event that you’re meeting one of the richest women on the planet. Cat Grant, media mogul, she had clawed her way up from her beginning as an aide to Perry White and had carved out a cranny for herself in the international media circus that defined human culture.

She might be five-two on a good day, but she was as intimidating as any person Kara had met.

Cat’s eyes, roving over her dress pants, dress shoes - that she had borrowed from Alex after panicking, they didn’t quite fit right—too small for her feet, left her toes cramped like nobody’s business - white dress shirt and tie, felt at the same time an attempt to observe her and to criticize her choice in clothing.

Not that it had been a choice, considering this was about all she had left in terms of “formal wear”. She hadn’t needed to be formal in years! She was a researcher for birds, do you know where birds generally like to be? Not in places you can navigate in a pencil skirt, is where.

“Very...” Cat Grant, the woman who had taken time out of her day to assess whether or not she deserved to belong to the fledgling nature magazine, a woman who didn’t have to do that since she was pretty sure she could hand the job off to anyone else, hesitated. She hesitated, tilted her head, glanced askance towards one of the monitors behind her, one lit up by a rainbow. Something about another country in Europe legalizing gay marriage. “Butch.”

Kara felt her face heat up, opened her mouth to correct, but couldn’t quite manage it. At all. Words, in general, were beyond her right now because Kara was pretty sure Cat Grant thought she was a butch outdoorswoman and it was very surreal. Oh god, please help. She should’ve listened to Eliza’s rules, she should’ve just kept doing labs and got her Master’s instead of trying for any of this—

“Close your mouth, for Pete's sake,” Cat—no, er, Miss Grant? That felt better—Miss Grant said in that sort of tone parents used on unruly children.

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. Thankfully she could at least follow orders.

“So this is mostly a formality, Lindsey has reassured me repeatedly that you're a good student of hers and that she has all the trust in the world for you,” Miss Grant drawled, leaning back onto one of her too-thin heels, eyes narrowing. “Can’t say I personally see it yet, but then Lindsey hasn’t lied to me yet.”

Professor Vance hadn’t said her friend was the woman herself.

She really should’ve! That was pertinent information—

“Are you going to say anything?” Miss Grant interrupted.

Kara reached up on impulse, fiddled with the frame of her glasses, pushing them back up the sweat-slicked bridge of her nose. “I like birds,” she said, stupidly. On impulse. Because she was a moron and all of her social interaction over the last four years of study had been with other people who were equally socially inept.

Miss Grant blinked, looking for a half-second completely bewildered, before her face settled back into neutral semi-disdain. “Yes,” she confirmed easily. “Your pictures said as much.”

“I would like the job?” Kara tried, the words coming out in a rush.

“Then you’ll have it,” Miss Grant said, raising one hand up to prevent any words coming out of her mouth, not that she was about to speak or anything. “But, sincerely, work on... talking. I expect more from my employees, and interns are no exception.”

    The first couple of months working as an intern and balancing her continued studies was, in all honesty, pretty rough. It took a while to find an equilibrium between the two, where she wasn’t constantly behind on one thing, and it had taken some pretty severe restructuring to her schedule.

Most of her coworkers for the new potential nature magazine were older, people who had worked in the field for more years than she had been alive for, including those she’d spent in the Phantom Zone. Most of them were men, with a few women thrown in for good measure, and a handful of them weren’t very fond of her. She was the youngest by no small margin, and she hadn’t made much of an impact yet, hadn’t yet proven herself to them.

But things got better. Alex at some point finished up her own schooling and went on to do secretive lab things that she thought Kara didn’t know about. Eliza got back to working in the xenobiology field, on-and-off, and the time spent over Thanksgivings and Christmases were defined by a near-constant chatter of scientific intrigue. It was nice, not quite a change, but more of things settling in.

She got her own apartment, even. It had been grandfathered to her by Alex, to be fair, and was absurdly cheap for the region and it required she balance a part-time job with an internship and a university degree but, well. She managed.

“You raised a pigeon, right?”

Kara blinked up at her coworker, one Richard Blackler. He was an older gentleman, in his mid-to-late sixties, with a head of absurdly thick graying hair that showed no sign of receding. “Yes?” She answered, or at least tried. Social things were still hard, she again hadn’t spent much of any time in university bothering to socialize and her restrictive friend pool hadn’t grown beyond Alex and a few others in a long, long time.

“They still around?” Richard continued.

Kara shook her head. “No, died five months ago.” Normally, pigeons lived to about six years—Cook had made it to four, in large part due to her spoiling him on food and his general distaste towards anything athletic. He’d just passed away in his sleep one day, and unlike Clucks, due to how she’d pitched Cook, she didn’t get to bury him.

Or, well, she didn’t in theory. Cook went ‘mysteriously missing’ after he had been acquired by the university and while people probably had their suspicions, there was no way to prove that she did it, considering she had flown to the roof of the building and broken in that way. She’d buried him back home after another flight, right beside Clucks.

“Either way,” Richard began, smiling guilelessly. “How would you feel about a short trip to Metropolis?”

...Not great? Clark was uh, upset wasn’t the operative word. Clark didn’t really get upset with her. Maybe ‘disappointed’ might be better? He just, they hadn’t talked in a while. Like, three years a while, because she had been busy and she was bad at opening up lines of communication and—

“You’ll get your name on the article. It’s about how city birds have adapted.” Richard’s smile grew significantly less guileless, and suddenly Kara had the ominous sensation that she had walked into a trap. “After all, that’s what you were doing an extra study on, right?”

...Ah. Shoot.

She’d forgotten about that.

    Clark met her at the airport with Lois. He’d taken one long look at her, her outfit - jeans, big mountain-hiking boots, a huge backpack, and a massive sweater - and pulled her into a tight hug, saying how he’d missed her.

She’d returned the hug, empowered by her own guilt and the fact that Clark was among some of the few people she could hug at full strength without risking crushing them to a pulp.

“So, you said a few weeks, but do you know how long you’ll be staying with us exactly?” Clark asked sometime into their drive towards his place, one hand steady on the wheel as he stared, looking utterly bored, at the red light in front of him.

“Twenty days, if that’s okay?” Kara managed to get out, folding her hands together. “I can find another place to stay if—”

“Nope,” Lois interrupted brightly, and Kara couldn’t help the tug of her own lips pulling up into a smile, even as she buried her chin in the fluff of her oversized sweater. “You’re staying with us, and if Clark has an issue with that...”

“Which I don’t,” Clark said airily, pulling the car back into motion as the light turned to green. Someone behind them leaned on the horn, and Kara winced.

“Which he doesn’t,” Lois echoed, not missing a beat. “But if he did, he’d be sleeping on the couch. Outside. In the rain. Because I’m not letting my boyfriend’s little cousin get exploited by the absolute shit housing market in our fine city.”

“Wait,” Kara interrupted. Because, well. Wait. “Boyfriend?”

Lois and Clark turned to look at her. She shrunk back.

Lois, without looking up, aimed a swat at Clark’s head. He yelped, the car lurched a little, but didn’t stray too far. “Eyes on the road, Smallville, and seriously you didn’t tell her?!”

“I thought she knew! I wasn’t exactly subtle!”

“Yeah, well, she clearly doesn’t!”

“We’ve been dating for nearly ten years now! I thought it was obvious!”

    One of the benefits nobody tells you about when you’re gifted yellow sun derived superpowers is that you don’t get sore, or achy, or anything. Kara had vivid memories of having regular morning cramps as a kid in her legs during her growth period, the sort of charlie horse-esque bundles of agony.

Normally this wouldn’t really be a very real benefit. Sure, she might never wake up with an ache in her back because she slept wrong, but in any other line of work that would just be nice. Not something that informed her day-to-day.

But when she spent hours on her stomach, perched into awful positions that she knew should be doing some pretty awful things to her musculature, all to take a photo of a pair of pigeons and a crow in some half-lit, dingy alleyway smelling like a laundromat, well. It became important. Very important. She got a lot of very real envy for being able to get up after a photoshoot like this sort of thing without even wincing, still limber despite the horrible things she had been doing to her posture.

Admittedly she wasn’t totally fond of the fact that she was laying in an alleyway with her camera out and it was really not hygienic under any definition of the word, and everything kinda smelled, and there was a cigarette butt a few feet away from her that didn’t really smell like nicotine, no sir, but she’d take the upsides to the downsides. She kinda had to, considering the series of events that led her to laying down in some alleyway on an alien planet.

Finally, after hours of patience, after everything, she was lining up her shot. The camera Eliza gave her all of those years ago still felt sturdy in her hands, perfectly suited to fit between her palms. She could see the pigeons finally settle in, looking relaxed even despite how close the crow was, who themselves seemed to be content as well. It would be a perfect image to run with for her article and—

“Oh my god, are you okay?!”

The birds flew away.

Kara felt something inside of her die.

Turning her head slowly, achingly, to find the source of the voice which had just ruined hours of sitting around on the awful shitty ground of Metropolis all to get a single photo she kinda didn’t need but that sunk cost fallacy had rendered impossibly important, Kara finally set her sights on the person in question.

It was a woman, about her height, with long, black hair, bright green eyes, and lips almost cherry red. Her skin was that sort of pale that seemed almost washed out, though there was a hint of colour to her cheeks from the cold outside. She had high cheekbones that led down into a defined jaw and chin. She spoke with a slight Irish lilt, very disconnected, a long-faded accent, a bit like the one she had.

She was, in a word, very, very pretty.

Stupidly pretty.

Like, end of the world pretty.

“The, birds,” Kara managed to get out between her stupid lips and stupid brain that was currently trying to process the pretty woman staring down at her. The one wearing the sort of business casual with long pants and heels, all the things she had tried to be with her wardrobe during that one meeting with Miss Grant that had brought her here in the first place.

The woman’s eyes flicked up, caught sight of the birds flapping wildly to new spots. Her eyes glanced down, caught sight of her camera, clutched tightly, and her face widened into shock, then guilt. “Oh, shite”—the last word was murmured beneath her breath quickly, like she was afraid of someone overhearing it—“I am so sorry, were you about to take a photo?”

Kara nodded, because words were frankly beyond her and—actually, thinking about it, why did this always happen around women? She could look a man down and say exactly what she thought but when it came to women she just, y’know, couldn’t.

Actually, on second thought, now really wasn’t the time.

“Jeez, I just—that’s bad. I am so sorry, I don’t think they’re coming back down.”

Kara spared the birds a glance, all puffed up and looking mightily offended by being interrupted in their naps. They probably weren’t, yeah.

“Here, uh,” the woman reached into one pocket, rummaging around until she could procure a card-sized piece of paper. Reaching up to one ear, she plucked the pen out from behind it, scribbling something down before, finally, crouching down and handing it off to her. “I know this is really suspect, but, if you need any help within reason, call this number? I have to go and yell at someone.”

Kara glanced down.

The words ‘Lena Luthor’ and a long string of digits which constituted a phone number stared back up at her.

Her mind ground to a shuddering halt.

    Jack was laughing hysterically by the time she stormed back into the classroom.

“You absolute dick!” Lena yelled, pointing at him.

It only made him laugh harder. The ass, the childish, fucking absurd ass.

“You could’ve told me!” Lena continued, unabated, because Jesus Christ was that fucking embarrassing.

She’d walked up to the window not five minutes ago because Jack kept getting distracted by something out there, and she’d looked down to find a woman on her face, legs splayed out, tense as a wire. Assuming the worst, and not having Jack to rectify that assumption, she’d run down to check to make sure she wasn’t out cold or worse yet dead and—and—

“Stop laughing!” She wailed.

Her best friend doubled over, laugh sputtering off into a wild series of unsteady breaths. He wiped his eyes, a snort escaping him in a woosh every few seconds. “You didn’t ask,” he teased, glancing up at her from between his fingers. “She had to have been down there for like three hours. All for some pigeons.”

Lena had been trained to be socially adroit, had been all but groomed to be publicly adored, and despite Lex’s continued attempts to ram the family name into the dirt, she had managed that much.

Or at least, she had thought she did.

“God damn it, Jack,” Lena managed to get out with a sigh.

Jack started laughing again, the prick.

    Clark and Lois sat around the table with her. The card was in the center of the table, innocuous blue ink standing out against the white-and-black of what, upon closer inspection, was a small advertisement for a gay bar.

She, purposefully, did not look at Clark.

“You’ve been here for five days,” Lois said, not sounding terribly surprised.

“Under a week,” Clark agreed with a hum, voice gravelly. “New record?”

Lois, out of the corner of her eye, paused, head tilting thoughtfully. “Think so?”

“It’s the Kryptonian curse,” Clark said sagely, or at least, sagely enough that Kara had to remind herself he was being sarcastic and there was, hopefully, not a literal curse attuned to Kryptonians out there. She had been given bedtime stories about the cults who had worshiped Yuda Kal and what they would do to kids who stayed up too late. “But, more seriously, you probably shouldn’t do anything with this.”

“I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with this,” Kara muttered, reaching for it.

Lois swatted her hand. “A pretty girl gave you her number on the back of a girl bar advertisement, I think that warrants something.”

“Lois,” Clark said, voice tinged with a warning. “She is a Luthor.”

“And Zod’s a Kryptonian, but that hasn’t stopped me from—”

Kara leapt to her feet with enough force to send the chair away, snatching the card up and pressing both hands to her ears. “Nope!” She yelled, waddling back and towards the guest bedroom, ignoring Lois’ unbidden cackles. “Not thinking about that! I’m going to go study!”

    Idle curiosities, if not previously made clear, were her banes. The card had sat like a hunk of particularly volatile uranium in her bag throughout the remainder of her stay in Metropolis, even after. Her thoughts had constantly been dragged back towards it, even when she’d been awkwardly congratulated for her article and the interest people had taken in the magazine. Even when she was raised from intern to part-time - she had an actual salary now, she didn’t have to work at Noonan’s, and however much she would miss the free food, she wouldn’t ever miss working retail - her thoughts would, inevitably, be dragged back to it.

The curiosity never really left her. Not even after Lex Luthor was arrested after killing over 30 people in an attempt to murder her cousin. Half the reason she knew anything about it was because she’d become fixated on seeing how Lena responded, seeing her take the reigns, seeing her push for a rebranding.

She didn’t forget about her when she decided to finish her Master’s early, stopped taking her time with the sciences and pushed herself far, far ahead of where people had assumed her to be, finishing everything out before the year ended.

Even when her sister’s plane fell, even when she plucked it out of the sky. Even when she revealed herself to Winn, a coworker who regularly came over to the nature magazine’s office for reasons completely beyond her. Even after Astra, even after Myriad, even after Non and Fort Rozz and flying up into space and nearly dying.

She never forgot. It was the intrusive thought to end all intrusive thoughts, the card still tucked away in her sock drawer, waiting for the chance to be used.

    It had been a while since she needed to dress up. This time, however, she had the disposable income to afford some things and didn’t have to steal her sister’s shoes, so that was a plus. It wasn’t that much different from the ensemble she’d worn those years ago when she’d met Miss Grant, though at least this time around it was refined. She wore the same dark dress pants, and with her own set of dress shoes, alongside a button-up white dress shirt, with sleeves rolled to her elbows.

Lena Luthor’s secretary stared back at her, utterly unimpressed. “Name and appointment?” She drawled.

Kara tried not to fidget. “Uhm, er—Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature? Here to interview Miss Luthor about her new push for environmentally friendly tech?” More specifically her recent developments in helping regrow the redwood forests, in the canopies of which were actual ecosystems that needed protection.

The secretary stared narrowly at her, suspicious and unwelcoming but, thankfully, Kara had grown up enough not to fold beneath it.

Letting out a sigh, the woman motioned towards the door. “She’s waiting for you.”

    Lena Luthor had been having a trying few months. Lex had gone insane, she’d had to help sentence her brother to multiple life sentences,  she’d had to take over L-Corp, break off her friendship with Jack - as, despite joking about it, both of them weren’t comfortable with being any more than each other’s beards - by leaving Metropolis. She’d had to deal with Clark motherfucking Kent breathing down her neck not a few days ago. She’d had to deal with the fact that Supergirl likely didn’t trust her because her brother had, repeatedly, tried to murder her cousin.

She’d had to deal with a lot. Too much, really. It was actually starting to get to her. Lena knew she could be suited to be a CEO—that much wasn’t up for debate. She could do it, she just... didn’t want to. She liked being a lab worker, liked exploring the field of study she so enjoyed, liked a lot of things about her old life.

But she had to step up to the plate, considering the other alternative was her mother and if she thought Lex handled the company’s money poorly, Lilian would be a nightmare.

Running her hand over her eyes, Lena glanced back down at the report on her desk. Another bit of cash Lex had illegally squirrelled away for anti-Kryptonian weapons development. It was starting to become a pattern, to the point where she was worried she’d start finding the damn ledgers under rugs or on high shelves, considering how much he’d done to actually hide them.

Then again, nobody had even tried to look into Lex’s personal files, so it’s not a surprise he considered his own security airtight.

The door to her office opened with a steady swish, and she flicked her eyes up, catching sight just as the person opening it walked in.

Bird girl stared back at her.

...It was probably bad that it was the only name she knew her by, but ‘bird girl’ had become something of a myth among her and her close friends. Jack had made it into a joke, and it’d kinda proliferated, especially when they found out she had given her her own name and number on the back of a Frozen Strobe advertisement—that being one of the more popular gay bars in the area. Nothing about it to her had been all that funny, it had, in fact, been extremely embarrassing and she had just finally started to forget it happened.

Apparently, life was not so easy. “Ah,” she said, voice coming out awkwardly.

Bird girl smiled back, just as awkwardly, reaching up to fiddle with her glasses. “Hi,” she said, voice soft. “I’m, uh, Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature. I’m here to talk about the redwood project?”

Oh. She could work with that.

    One hour turned into two, then three, and one meeting into two, then three, then four. Lena really wasn’t sure how things had progressed to this point, but if you got past the shy outer shell of Kara Danvers you could find for yourself a bumbling, broadly-smiling sweetheart with an absurd love for birds.

It was... weird. Lena didn’t really have friends, hadn’t for most of her life. Her family name before had been a daunting point of prestige, the Luthors were wealthy in the way that few people were. They came from old money, and lots of it, with a fair amount of prestige chasing their heels. People hadn’t wanted to be friends with her, and the ones who had just wanted what she could give them through her reputation.

She’d managed to find some friends, though. Jack, Sam, Jess, even to a certain extent Andrea of all people—and now, in National City, she had none of them. She and Jack didn’t talk much, Sam was too busy cleaning up after Lex, Jess was around, yes, but also too busy, the restructuring wasn’t a simple task, after all.

After Lex, her reputation had been ruined for different reasons. Xenophobia, hatred, things she didn’t associate with herself—people kept their distance. The gay clubs she’d gone to that one time out of a need to just get away had rejected her at the door, even despite being a long-term visitor. Nobody wanted her, she tainted everything she touched.

Except for Kara, apparently.

Kara, who was sweet and kind. Kara, who didn’t care about her last name. Kara, who stayed with her until three in the morning once, all to have an interview that was more them chatting than anything else. Kara whose Instagram was surprisingly popular and utterly devoted to birds. Kara, who loved ducks and had duck-print pyjamas she’d shown off during one of the movie nights she’d invited her over to, which she had endured even when being stared at by distrusting eyes by Kara's adoptive sister.

Kara, who was Supergirl.

Because, really, she wasn’t stupid.

But that was okay, because even if Kara was Supergirl, she could keep that secret, or at least the approximation of one. They all had their secrets, all had their wants and needs and... well, Kara was her want. And her need.

Which was not something that could stand.

So she’d done as all Luthors did and planned. Showing absurd amounts of affection to people she felt things towards before had always backfired. Lionel had been distant and unresponsive to shows of childish affection, Lillian had been worse, she’d gone so far as to complain to her about wasting money when she’d tried once, during the holiday, to give her flowers. Lex had just never been comfortable with strong displays of affection, hadn’t known how to respond to it, and so, like Lionel, he never had.

In the end, she sent Kara an office full of flowers in the hopes that maybe it’d be juuust enough to scare her off.

    Lois’ words had been something of a seedling for a long, long time. A number written on the back of a girl bar ad, the sort of plot point you’d read out of a trashy romance novel you got for free or very cheap on Kindle.

She and Lena had never really talked about sexuality. Kara’s had always been up in the air, and considering she’d been socially ostracized and not particularly invested in any of it, she hadn’t really dated in the first place. It was hard to explain to Alex and Eliza that Krypton didn’t really have a concrete concept of gendered attraction. The matrix did everything for you, you didn’t need to think about it. Pregnancy wasn’t an issue either, considering everyone was birthed through the matrix.

Girl, boy, neither, or something else—she hadn’t been raised to care, because, in the end, the matrix would choose the person she would have the best chance of loving, and any obligations to continue the progeny of the House of El would be handled by technology. She didn’t need to think about pregnancies, sex had been an almost primal concept on her planet; people did it, sure, but people didn’t talk about it because that wasn’t the primary focus of any relationship.

How could you explain that to someone who grew up being sorted into boxes? Whose concept of sexuality was tied to hard yes-or-no questions? Sure people who didn’t answer yes or no existed too—bisexual, pansexual, asexual, but these labels, they weren’t... relevant, to her. She didn’t even know what to call herself, how could she explain it to anyone else?

But, like. She wasn’t ignorant, or stupid. Or even that unaware. She knew that she had feelings for other people, however stifled, she knew what feeling attraction was like.

So, yes, she might’ve been blindsided, stumbling into her office only to find it literally almost overflowing with red roses. Yes, she might’ve been a little overwhelmed too. Sure. She might’ve felt awkward for the period of time she didn’t know who it was from, or why.

But she felt... hopeful, when she found out it was Lena.

This was all new to her. She’d put aside sexuality, put aside romance in large part because, well, it didn’t... work. For her. She’d never been given the option to explore it as a teenager and attempts to romance her, well, she’d shut down. Hard. She was over a decade too late to begin exploring that part of herself, she had resigned herself to just existing, and she’d been fine with it, you know?

Rolling the stem of a rose between her fingers, Kara wasn’t so sure if that was the case anymore.

    There were three things in life Lena had come to expect would never happen, even if it was, technically, possible.

The first was that Lex would become her brother again. Not that she had been disowned, but rather in the sense that he’d drop his xenophobic obsession and just, be her brother again. Be the person who consoled her, who took care of her when her adoptive parents couldn’t be bothered.

The next was one day clearing the Luthor name, if the first wasn’t possible. Some day, down the line, the Luthor name would no longer be associated with a mass-murderer and xenophobic technology, but she knew better than to fully expect that. Knew that it would take generations before Lex’s impact retreated from public knowledge.

The last, and final thing, was Kara asking her out on a date. Bit of a light subject to include in those other two things, she knew that, but Kara had become something of her only support line in the city at this point and you could, frankly, excuse her for putting a lot of emphasis on that.

She’d expected Kara to retreat, to pull away, to respond to her show of affection as most people had in her life.

Instead, Kara, shy, demure Kara, stood with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, wearing the very same outfit she’d met her for the second time in. Her face was beet-red, eyes wobbly and embarrassed, unable to focus on any one thing at any one time. If anything, the severity of awkwardness Kara worked under was always surprising. Supergirl was always confident, always sure, and Kara was the dead opposite. Kara was never sure-footed, always cautious, always ready to apologize.

But here she was, of her own volition, with a bouquet clutched in one hand, wearing what Lena was pretty sure was the fanciest thing she owned. After having just rushed in, ignoring Jess’ protests, and asked her on a date.

Jess, shell shocked and stunned, stood in the entryway to her office.

Kara, awkward and sheepish, stood not too far from the couch, fidgeting in place.

Lena, breathing in, then out, kept the smile from her face, if only to not look like a complete doofus. “You could’ve texted me.” Or called, really.

Kara’s flush grew brighter. “I wanted to ask in person.”

That was Kara for you. An oxymoron in every sense of the word, kind and caring and so, so very passionate. A girl who was very set in her ways, a girl Lena didn’t deserve, but couldn’t quite bring herself to resist.

“How does Friday at twelve sound?”

[cadviium]

of strange waters and even stranger fish

That morning, perched at the end of the dock, the fisherman had only one thing on his mind: the noon bell in Riceville. An arguably menial and temporary inconvenience, really. Only a few seconds of dull droning echoing across the water. Still, the clock on his wrist was checked almost manically as he flipped his forearm over, back, then over again, watching the minute hand inch steadily closer to the fateful hour. Once that siren went off, it would be over. 

After enough years at sea, you tend to gain a certain understanding of the water, of its inhabitants– both those you should and shouldn’t be aware of– and this man understood with great certainty the finicky and fidgety nature of a coddled fish and the steadfast composure of one not so. 

The marine fish to whom he dedicated several decades were not of the coddled sort. In spite of their stick-splinter bones and lace gills, they endured the pitch and throw of the stir above them unflinchingly, braved the bubbles and fizz of an unsettled ocean. The bestial grating of salt, the cracking of bows and splitting of hulls, mere backdrop to a plodding existence. Vagabonds with aperture eyes that bore witness to treading feet going still, void and unblinking, with nares like slits that could smell the pulpy metallic tang that invited teeth, teeth, and more teeth, they paid no mind to the rubbing of rope and the shearing of scales and the dull glinting of steel. Seawater was lawless and impassive, a briny gnawing of mouth and molars, a collision of gods challenging water with wind, infinity with paper fins, and the fish were too. 

He couldn’t say the same for the water in Riceville. It lapped slow against the spruce pier, bored, lazy, like a pot-bellied dog running its tongue over its own sick, so the fish here were not used to the pitiless thundering of the earth making percussion of their backs. They were only accustomed to a passive suggestion of a wave, a caress in place of a crash, and would respond with alarm to any disturbance beyond that sluggish pull of the water. 

With this came the issue of the noon bell. 

It was a relatively new addition to the town, only implemented when the mayor was informed that time was making a run for it and now needed to be reined back in. That was less than a month ago, not nearly enough time for the fish to acclimate. Those chimes would strike the lake’s face with the ferocity of a blasphemous nun, folding and crimping the surface into a paper fan, combing the depths, pushing the water together, pulling it apart again, braiding it, and it would inevitably send the fish scattering like dropped pills, burrowing in weeds where they could and getting tangled in taut, panicked circles where they could not. So sheltered. So fussy. 

There was something gentle about it for a while, he thought. The fishing pole fit that fit his hand like an old friend, the soft cork of the handle kneaded and compressed until the indents matched his knuckles, his fingers, his fingernails. The repetitive casting and reeling, casting and reeling, and bringing nothing up. With that rhythmic tranquility came possibility, and it was the possibility that made it worthwhile. But now noon was coming. That possibility would flee, fins slashing through the thick calm, and the empty palms of his hands were beginning to ache furiously. 

He had no fish, nothing to present to Gardner and no reason to say, “See? Maybe next time you’ll put down the GameBoy and come with the old man.”

This was his life, baiting, luring, reeling. What would he be if he couldn’t even bring in one panfish? What would he be to Gardner? Not worth the time. The grip on the fishing rod tightened– if only minutely– with that thought. He needed that fish, and he needed it badly. 

His musings were interrupted by a floating object encroaching upon his periphery through a split in the trees. A boat, the first one in a while, carving a triangle into the ripples with tender precision, not lawful enough to be a surgeon, not careless enough to be a criminal. White, white like bleached bone, white like satin moths, white like ladyfish convulsing on an oily deck. The deck of this boat was empty– no oil, no ladyfish, and, oddly enough, no passengers. From what the man could tell, there was no one on the boat. 

“Hey, Murray! Back again?” came from the boat anyways, drawling and defiant towards Murray’s expectations for it. Murray wasn’t shocked. This was usually how things worked around here. Upon closer inspection, the man saw a vague shadow in the captain’s cabin, the bareboned outlines of something that might’ve been a person, but also maybe not, a being of less concrete shapes and more negative space. The fisherman smiled and waved back anyways, hand flicking backward once like he were swatting a gnat; it’d be rude not to. 

“Yessir, just got in,” Murray called back with hands cupped around his mouth, dutifully ignoring the way the boat’s ivory paint sung in the late morning rays like a surfaced pearl, how it made him the greying mothball tucked in the corner of the boat’s closet. 

“You be sure to tell Lauren and her boy hello for me. I haven’t been down to that ol’ farmhouse in quite a while.” 

Don’t worry, he’d be sure to greet the closed doors, the rivets in the wood, the curves and halted twists in the knobs. He’d say hello to the scattered toys strangled in wires like veins, to the empty driveways scrubbed of chalk, to the quiet dinner tables with open seats but spotless plates. He’d raise his hat to the disgruntled elbows and disinterested shoulders and dolly eyes, to the “we’re going into town” and the “we’ll be a few hours late.” 

If the greeting were on the boat’s behalf, would the tension finally leak from their joints, dripping onto the hardwood like spoiled milk? Would the knots in their backs finally be worked into paste? Would he finally feel welcomed? Murray nodded to the boat in a way that was not a promise but could’ve been a confirmation and prayed the boat’s company– or lack thereof– took no notice of how even the boat was better dressed than he.

He wore an offensive orange vest, an unholy brawl of stiff fabric and angry stitches with pockets upon pockets, layered and stacked on top of and under one another like playing cards, so many that not even the man was aware of all their contents. Under the barbed intensity of the vest sagged a tired flannel and graphic t-shirt that read, “The 1968 Plymouth Road Runner: Anything less is just a car.” His first ride. Crashed the beauty into a henhouse in the summer of ‘81 and, evidently, hasn’t gotten over it. Atop his head was hair of a close-cut grey, the sort of grey that screamed couch change, dust bunnies, and other forgotten things. Covering that was a creamy bucket hat, yellowing with age, the brim reduced to patchwork and loose string. While he mourned the majority of his outfit, Murray turned a blind eye to the cap. It was a gift, a dying hat from a young boy to an old man, and he felt no shame in wearing it. 

As the pearly split in the lake continued along its persistent eastward path, the water returned to its unnatural quiet, the dips and splashes of his line and lure lacerating the surface its only note. He was entranced by the coal-black water, the way it smelled like nostalgia, like rotting seaweed fermenting on a prop. The way it rehashed the constant small fry he’d hook from the surface each year, the awareness of something further in the depths, the simultaneous fear of the known and unknown.

Reminiscing was suffocating in the stale, near-noon sun. 

On every horizon stood trees, encompassing and blocking him in like a battalion, especially the dense woods behind him. They didn’t move with the breeze. Birds sat silent in those treetops, indifferent watchdogs with eyes upon eyes upon him. What they were guarding, he didn’t know. Directly behind him, branches cracked, and the dense cloud of dirt and sticks and other mysteries at his back got heavier.

With the boat gone, Murray sat by the water alone. He’d recently noticed no one really swam in the lakes around here, this one in particular. He asked some clerk named Luke about it yesterday, and she’d only muttered something about cleanliness and a chemical spill back in April. A terrible tragedy, really decimated the farming industry this year. She never looked up from the coins on the counter, though she’d already totaled them to eleven-eleven twice.

That must be why the fish were so disinterested. Yes, there was something wrong with the lake. He’d have to explain that to Gardner. It was possible Gardner already knew, and that’s why he’d refused to come; he was the local after all. They could try a different lake tomorrow, perhaps that one near the repair shop. Even as he thought this, an unopened spool of fishing line and a smaller fishing rod still shiny with novelty mocked him relentlessly from the trunk of his car.

His fishing line was sagging in the middle, draped across the surface like stray hair. He reeled, cast, checked his watch again. 11:44.

At 11:53, the birds erupted from the trees behind him, a thick, writhing mass of beating wings and beating hearts. Murray started at the shift in atmosphere, at the sound of air pulsing like dusty rugs shook over a balcony rail, his mouse-trap jaw flinging shut, but then he settled. 

What were a few birds to him? He wasn’t fishing for birds.

 Above him was a sky at war with the crows and the cardinals, the black-backed woodpeckers and black-capped chickadees. They were blind and bumbling in their panic, bodies slamming against tufts, into talons, a collision of comets. 

Murray stared with the indifference of a sea bass as an unlucky few were struck from the sky and sent careening downwards like heavenly pariahs, their feathers spilt ink in the midday sun. The nimblest of birds with bodies sleek as knives– the swifts, the sparrows, the songbirds that didn’t sing– managed to pull up before hitting the water, wingtips razoring their glassy reflections. Fate and physics were not so kind to the bigger birds and their still-fumbling fledglings. Backs, glossy like lacquer, crashed into the tame hills. They thrashed hysterically against their swampy cradle, dotting water across the lake in a constellation, their wings slackened by gravity or drag or maybe just teeth. 

The fishing pole suffocated in Murray’s now-tense fist, but only for a moment; before long, the newfound rigidity in his shoulders drained like stale bathwater, and he nodded twice. Sure, the splashing would have without a doubt scattered the bluegill and the perch and other docile panfish, but it also drew in the more ravenous beasts lurking deep in the weeds with their pin teeth and pincushion jaws. They’d be prettier trophies anyways.

The surviving birds spread through the air like ripples of a different kind, blacks and browns and reds arching across the sky in swells. He watched them go as the last of the drowning birds slipped into the abysmal black of the water, leaden ghosts, all silent and all without purpose, surrounded but alone. 

The birds died like Murray lived.

From beyond the trees, not long after the birds, came a grinding screech like metal peeling against gravel. It lurched in the air, halting and mounting in intensity, a red carpet rolling out in the breeze, and Murray lurched with it, left arm darting outwards as he swiveled towards the woods; the fishing pole followed, skidding its oversized lure along the rocky lakebed. The scream was a heartbeat on its own; it pounded with the floundering desperation of an animal without the mind or lungs or wings to flee, the pace fluttering like a sunken bird, a coddled fish.  

It was distinctly boyish, a noise ridden with gasping pleas and strained vocal cords. That could’ve been Gardner. What? No, it couldn’t have. That didn’t make sense. Pull yourself together. 

Murray’s throat tightened in a vice he hadn’t felt since his hair was full and his spine straight, a vice from a time when the sun ate at his flayed collarbones and torrents rocked his ship with the reckless abandon of a young mother. Back when his hands weren’t as rough as the rope nets they strained against, before the neverending loitering on the ends of piers. Back when he didn’t have to concentrate for the thrill of stinging salt in his eyes and in his nose and in his mouth to manifest itself. 

Somewhere in the claw and bite of the howling, he saw himself. He knew it all too well, that moment when human retreated to animal, when cognition lost itself to the frenzied scrambling of instinct. The sudden absence of your internal organs. The feeling of your ribcage folding in on itself, collapsed at the sternum. The dread that you were about to learn what a hooked fish already knew. The scream-soaked boy in the woods sounded like he was starting to understand.

With great apprehension, Murray studied the trees that stretched from the dirt like witches’ fingers, gnarled and reaching towards blue, and the dark spaces left between them, the roots and limbs that branched out like nerve endings. Despite his being a seaman, he recognized a few certainties about the forest. He knew it was a place that breathed, often in more ways than one. There were lungs hidden in those trees, in the rushing of wind on his neck, in the shuddering of bushes, in the wriggling of larva on rancid meat. He knew it was a place that savored the hot reek of decay, bathed in it. A place that would leer with greedy eyes as you rotted and boiled and pussed, as the ravens ripped and the pigs picked. And he definitely knew it was a place where he did not want to be. 

Even from the dock, Murray smelled the dredging weight of blood painting the dank air. It hung heavy in the heat like a dark curtain flung closed in mourning, a bitter speckling of iron and warmth. He swore he could hear it, too, the dripping onto the dirt and leaves like a metronome in time with the ticking on his watch. Air misted in red really was a horribly sweaty and labored sort of air to breathe.

He took a wary step further from the end of the pier, closer to the beginning of the woods, and the bottom of his boot caught on every snag and splinter in the woodwork. Moving to take another, knee already bent with his foot hovering over the dock, he noticed a subtle resistance in his left hand. A tug on the fishing pole, one that drew the line taut as Murray pulled away but dropped it as he whipped back around, a butterfly’s kiss of a bite. 

In the crashing chaos, he’d nearly forgotten about the fishing pole, about the fish, both having fled to the back corners of his mind, loud children told to go be quiet in their rooms. But, now, they pounced back to the forefront, eager and all-consuming. He had to manually remind himself to breathe. In, out, in, out. Had he done it? A fish? It had to be. In that instant, even after decades of nets, poles, and spears, he forgot how his arms worked. Right then, they were useless rolls of ugly, disjointed meat with bends where bends were not meant to be, and he couldn’t seem to convince his brain to spin the reel handle. 

There was a brief pause in the screaming like it was thinking, and the cavity in the air cowered at the sudden unpredictability. Screaming was expected, foreseeable; silence was not. What followed was a soft shuffling in the leaves, dumb and dragging, nearly misread as the sloshing of the waves. It continued for maybe five seconds, maybe ten. Then a thud. A groan. And the shouting started up again, but it was now a much more wet and guttural thing, the kind of bawling that bubbled in your stomach and shredded your throat. Not just a fearful cry but a doomed one. 

The pole was a train track as it rattled in Murray’s unsteady hand. His mind was razed by a tug of war in which he was the rope, torn between two sides. One: his grandson, hugs, smiles, the smell of vanilla wafting to the living room, the beeping and buzzing of gadgets. The other: skittering eyes, a chest that spasmed with panic, a fight wrought of maw and teeth and willpower. He could tell that fight was made of more than his two hands could blot out. 

Now, Murray may not have been old quite yet, but he certainly was not young, a stalled car at a crossroads between expecting to live and preparing to die, and his body was starting to feel the effects. What good would he honestly be to the boy with his handicapped parking pass and aching knees? 

The boy. Not Gardner, of that much he was sure now. For all he knew, it wasn’t a boy at all. A vague thought made of more smoke than fire surfaced, a memory of a crew, a cry, and a conversation. 

“Them red foxes are sly little bastards,” a deckhand had said. “Sound just like a crying kid.” 

“Nah, mate,” interjected another, spitting a toothpick into the liquid mountains below, “they sound like a kid gettin’ axed to bits.” 

Of course. It was just a fox, red and angry. That’s all. Nothing worrisome about this simple, angry fox. Stop trembling, Murray. Only a fox.

And what was a fox to him? He wasn’t fishing for a fox.

He pulled his cap a little lower over his ears to mask those wails like tires squealing on pavement. There was a jumbled sentence living somewhere in that noise, a radio reporter suffocating under layers of static. It twitched in his head, flickering over the same words again and again. 

“I don't want to die.”

Ears lied. Murray was well aware of this by now. They lied when Gardner called him boring, they lied when they overheard Lauren on the phone– “I love Dad, but I’m tired of being his keeper… yeah, I miss Mom, too.”– and they lied when that damn red fox pleaded for help. Because it was a red fox. A red fox, not a boy, and red foxes do not talk nor beg nor comprehend their own mortality. 

Slowly, carefully, Murray rediscovered the crooks and cables in his arms, trying to redefine them as extensions of himself instead of parasitic appendages he held no liberty over.  He flexed his right index finger at his side, bowed it at the joint. Then his middle finger. Thumb, ring and pinky. Flattened them again. He straightened his left index finger off the rod’s handle, curled it back over the cork, repeated the motion for his thumb and middle finger. Cut a circle in the air with his wrist. Bent both arms at the elbow, extended them forwards. Rolled his shoulders back.

Finally, his right hand was brought up to grasp the reel handle, and he spun it around the axel like the minute-hand of a clock. The fish complied with the dull apathy of a leashed dog, weary and heaving. No struggle. No defiance. No nylon dicing the water as a wire does clay. 

A bulging maggot wriggled its way in between the folds and membranes of his thought process. What if it was not a fish at all? A clump of weed perhaps? It really was awfully still; the absence of that fluttering to and fro, of that pathway spanning an arch as wide as the line allowed, was just as loud as the fox.

Upon a brisk shake of his head, the maggot was muscled from his mind, smearing grease in its wake. No, it was a fish, he assured himself. A lazy one, maybe. One that slumped instead of swam, that floated instead of fled. But a fish nonetheless. 

He could still hear the shriek continuing to build– ragged and cold and full of gaps and breaks where the voice dropped out underneath like thin ice.

Reflected in the water, gazing in wonder at the fiber weaving around the reel, was Gardner’s face. Murray could see the smile through the tide, the square teeth, triangle lips; that, and the regret, the eyes oddly enraptured by wine stains on the carpet after he presented his soon-to-be bounty to the home. In the whirring of the line, he heard Gardner’s apology, the wishing he would've gone, the promises of a future outing, the interlocked pinkies. 

Like a skewered worm, the screaming squirmed in the air until it softened, flickered, a dying lightbulb of a sound. It became much less bright and serrated as the ice thawed to a lullaby of groaning. It was almost worse. What likely wasn’t (but could have been) calling for “someone” melted into what likely wasn’t (but could have been) begging for “anyone.” 

“Please, I don’t want to die alone.” More exhale than words. A trick of the mind.

Reeling, contemplating, he stayed on the dock, occupied by the handsome bottom feeder arrested at the end of his line. A man intoxicated, Murray was trampled by flashing images like a stop-frame film, flares of brown, blue, and grey. What awaited him under that blanket of water? The duck’s bill of a northern pike, green and plagued with white blotching? The prying whiskers of a catfish, stirring up a haze in the loose sediment? With each blink, a new enthralling possibility. Scales, slimy and gold in the sun. A distended belly, all slick fat and gummy flesh, overflowing in his paws. Gills like the underside of mushrooms. Fins unmarred by the curious nibbling of smaller fish.

There was more shuffling in the leaves now. Quicker this time, and quieter. With purpose. Murray heard a sharp intake of air, and in the next moment, it was cut off with a wet squelch, a noise like ramming your thumbs into rotten squash, like stepping on pumpkin guts, the innards squishing through your toes like worms from the damp earth, seeds plastered to your feet with orange syrup and stringy fruit and other sugary rot. The woods went silent again.

The fish’s head broke the surface. 

The stench broke next, reeking of curdled milk left in a hot car, of browning cabbage, of floating carcasses thrown about by the tide. The smell elicited little more than a scrunch of his nose, a possible downturn of his lower lip, but it was the sight of the fish that left him dumbfounded. Muddy and listless and undeniably dead. And not the type of dead that could be confused for slumber. The type of dead prophesied by beetles and gnats, the type that loomed in crumbling crypts, in the deserted rooms in hospital basements, in the soupy broth that marinates coffins. Long dead. Still a fish. Just a fish, just a fish, just a fish.

Swollen leech lips gaped open soundlessly; the beginnings of plants– green, white, and every shade of brown– flowered from the pyramid of silt clogging the space between them. Nothing was where it was meant to be, not even the hook, Murray noted. Not through rubber lips but through the fish’s eye did it tear, leaving it deflated and half-popped from its socket like a displaced joint, all wrong angles and exposed nerves. 

No bite then. He must’ve snagged it off the bottom. Did that still count as catching it? Sure, it did. A tinge of burning crimson alit in his chest, regardless of attempts at dousing the flame. Any fish was better than no fish. 

Neither the sight nor smell deterred him for too long either way– Gardner was waiting for him. Ignoring the slicing pain of nylon in the soft of his palm, he tugged the line upwards by hand until the abdomen was above water. He set the pole down beside him, line still cinched in his right, and leaned over the edge of the dock on his shins, fumbling through the warm water with his left and searching for purchase. Skin brushed against decay, and Murray snatched up both the fish’s wrists in his hand, the texture a strange mix of spongy flesh and thin, ridged plastic. Oh, they were already bound, how convenient. 

Line in the right and limb in the left, he tried to drag the body up onto the pier only to find the skin on its hands coming off in filmy slabs much like slippery gloves. Its hands slithered through his grip and splashed back down in the lake, a sucking pop in the fish’s neck sounding at the added weight on the line still hooked to the crannies of its skull. Wiping the greasy wads on his vest, dulling the orange with stains, he huffed once, like a taunted bull. 

Once more into the fray. 

Resolutely, the fisherman ignored the slush of soapy fat under his fingers as he rediscovered the wrists underwater and grabbed hold again. He arched backward, boots braced against the woodwork, drawing the fish into the sky until it fully broached the surface. More tissue tore off its back in little strips like soaked paper as Murray heaved it onto the dock. 

His catch now fully splayed out along the pier, arms bent in prayer, still joined at the wrist with elbows jutting out to the side, the ankle of one leg tucked behind the knee of the other, Murray stopped for several moments and did nothing but stare at this bulbous, buried thing he had dredged up. The skin was a beast to be in the presence of alone, a collage of rot with pruning green on top and a purple underbelly, spotty like watercolor, the whole body mottled with seeping blisters. Limbs were bloated balloon animals, blown up in cartoony colors. He thought about reaching down and twisting the arm into a purple-green dog, thought about shoving a pin into the fish’s cheek and listening for the pop and sputter of a collapsing inflatable. He did neither of these things.

Adorning the fish’s head were bread-colored curls and an upturned piggy nose weeping a gross syrup, a steady mix of water, blood, and something creamy and clotted that made the air taste of sour butter and sausages gone bad, percolated by mold. There were a few chunks missing here and there: an ear, a toe, various intermediate nuggets of meat. Even so, Murray cast a small blessing out for the meek nature of Riceville fish. Without it, this one would've been picked down to the grit and bone. 

Eventually, his attention turned back to action. With a thumb and forefinger, he pinched the hook at the joint between steel and string, jiggled it a bit, then twisted it from its anchor under the upper bone of the fish’s eye socket. The whole eye came with it, yanking braids of slime and sinew out behind it. 

Moss and milfoil grew from its mouth, taking root in the dirt and decaying gums. It was beautiful in a way, how life existed as a byproduct of decay, but that beauty had no place in a fish. He wrapped his fingers tight around the hollow stems, around the leaves like moth’s antennae, around the clumping earth, then ripped it all out; bits of festering tongue and tiny dandelion incisors came with it, ensnared in the green. Much better.

Though the animal still looked like the type of fish only a shark could love, it was sure sizable, Murray could grant it that. Definitely over a meter, maybe even a meter half? Nothing like the bass and panfish he usually brought in. Plus, the way all its colors came together to paint its smeared portrait was sure to trump even the best of artists. In spite of the circumstances, he couldn’t bar the pool of glee swelling in his chest, dripping down the caverns of his abdomen, spreading like flower petals at dawn. After a morning of bug bites and itchy welts, of a pulsing sun and pounding radiation, he’d done it. Finally. A fish for his grandson. 

The noon bell went off, stampeding over the water, a hum in his ears, a murmur in his ribcage, and the fisherman was all teeth. White, white like bleached bone, white like satin moths, white like dead ladies and dead ladyfish. His fist gripped the fish’s snarled and sodden hair with a shivering enthusiasm even as patches came off in clumps, plastered to the spaces in between his fingers.

He couldn’t wait to show Gardner his catch.

[briansproule-blog]

Stories Never Die

This past summer my dad finally decided to take down the barn that had been in the Sproule family for over a century. My dad grew up living on the farm which was located on the Lower Concession road in Ormstown. He had hired a company that takes down old barns in exchange for the precious wood that is very valuable. A couple weeks into the project one of the guys that was taking down the barn stopped by my dad’s house carrying a piece of paper in his hand. The look on my dad’s face was utter shock, he was amazed by what he was reading. It was a letter written in 1935 by my late great grandmother. She had hidden it in the wall of the old henhouse for someone to find in the future.

What was written in this letter was a summary of the years harvest, stories about life on the farm that summer and a list of family members and friends. At the end of the letter she writes, “Mrs. James Sproule placed this paper in the wall of the henhouse on November 27th at 2 o’clock, 1935. Who will find it?” It just goes to show how stories from the past never die, they will always live on as long as someone preserves the past. Maybe some day i’ll write a letter to the future me..

[blackjacketmuses]

hc; braig backstory

A slightly shortened version of Chapter 11 of my fic rewrite, in which I detail Braig’s backstory. It’s tragic as hell, and so very good.

The story starts on a world, a long time ago and a long way away. The world was called Airelann, and it was a quiet place. Full of magic and spirits and fae, heroes and legends, rolling emerald hills and lush forests, bustling towns and small rural villages. Magic was easy to find under rocks and in faerie rings, creatures lived in rivers and in caves and on the crossroads at night, and the people of the world were bright and caring and full of life.

In a little village by a forest is where the story takes place – a village of perhaps two hundred strong, if that, with a pasture for sheep and cattle, a few henhouses and a stable, a single church, a fountain in the square, and a single inn and tavern. This is the village where Braig Tallow was born.

His father a hunter and his mother a washerwoman, Braig lived a quiet and normal life – family was everything in the small village, a lesson passed down from parent to child for generations; blood and marriage-bond above all else. Everyone looked out for each other, but family came first. That’s what Braig was taught, just like everyone else. It was a simple fact of their lives, just like how to milk a cow, or how to avoid being tricked by a faerie.

Braig grew up with the rest of the children in the village, but the two most important to him were his neighbors, the twin daughters of the innkeep – Siobhan and Aisling Durnin. The two were like night and day to each other; Aisling gentle and sweet, kind and quiet, with a love for flowers, animals, and stories of romance,while Siobhan was rough-and-tumble, the knight to her sister’s princess, a firecracker who loved to cook and climb trees.

The three children were inseparable, playing from dawn to dusk every chance they could escape from chores and duties. The village all knew them well, knew their mischief, and it was a common talk at family firesides which of the two would Braig marry when they were of age – it was no if, to the village, but when. It was simply how things went.

In the end it was Aisling who he chose, the gentle girl marrying the bright-eyed hunter one soft spring morning, two happy youths only just approaching their second decade. Siobhan was happy, too – the trio took over the inn soon after, and in time no one could tell which was truly the wife to Braig’s husband, and to most it simply didn’t matter. They were family, the three of them, and far be it from anyone to claim it was more or less of one.

It wasn’t long after that a fourth joined the family, a squalling boy with dark hair and Braig’s brown eyes, a boy they named Jasper. He inherited much from his father – the same eyes and hair, the same hawkish nose and crooked smile, the same sense of mischief and adventure, and the same nose for getting into and out of trouble with a laugh and a grin and a sharp tongue.

The family was happy, and content with their lives. Aisling ran the inn with a gentle hand, cleaning and welcoming weary travelers, while Siobhan ran the kitchen and the bar, cooking hearty meals and making sure the whiskey and beer flowed free – though she made damn sure no one caused too much trouble on her watch. Braig kept a sharp eye on his girls and his son, travelling into the woods to hunt with the other men, coming home with sundries to sell at the town nearby and with stories to tell around the tables at the inn.

Jasper devoured the stories like you would a fresh sweet roll, sitting on the floor surrounded by the music and tales of his father and the other villagers. He was always sent to bed when the crowd got rowdy and the drinking songs got bawdy, but he still hovered at the top step to listen, entranced. He knew from a young age what he wanted to do and what he wanted to be – just like his father.

He would follow his father to the forest sometimes, Braig letting Jasper ride on their dog – a huge black hound named Ulster, loyal and perhaps with magic in him – and placing him safe in the crook of a tree while he hunted. Jasper would listen intently as Braig taught him what to look for, the signs of both fauna and fae, what to avoid and what to seek out, the tricks to keep yourself safe and when to run and when to stay very, very still.

Life was sweet as honey and calm as a warm summer afternoon for ten long years after Jasper’s birth, but as in all things, happiness never lasts forever, and the more content you are…the quicker Darkness is to take everything.

It was soon after Jasper’s tenth birthday, husband wife and son riding home from the city, Jasper wearing his gift proudly – a red bandanna snug around his neck to match his father’s. But they were never to make it home that night, for that was when the tides of Darkness that were slowly encroaching all the known worlds came to Airelann.

They struck without warning, hordes of living shadows with bright gold eyes, soundless and deadly. A tidal wave, a roiling tide bigger than the tallest oak and deadlier than any black hound or vengeful fae, and caught out in the middle of the road, the Tallows had nowhere to hide from it, no place to be that would protect them from the shadows.

Braig fought valiantly, tooth and nail and useless gun against the shadows that surrounded them, only to watch with fast-breaking heart as Aisling was killed before his eyes as she tried to protect their son – her still form slumping, her blood staining the ground as the shadows rolled over her and stole the red from her hair.

Only to watch as the shadows and Darkness took his son and took him, hands unable to grasp hold of one another as the blackness consumed them and threw them far across the universe, far from each other, far from the home that fell that night.

Braig woke on a world he did not know, the night sky full of stars blinking out, rain soaking the ground and soaking him to the bone, but he didn’t care. Couldn’t care – all he could see was his wife pale and still on the ground, all he could see was his son’s terrified face, and now they were gone. They were gone, and he was alone. No amount of screaming and begging, no amount of raw, bleeding hands clawing at the dirt and no amount of howling to the sky would bring them back to him.

So knowing he could not bring them back, he set off to search. Wherever the road took him, wherever he had to go – he would walk into the Underworld itself, tear down the gates of Faerieland if he had to if it meant finding his son, his only family left. He was alive, he had to be, and no matter what it took, what Braig had to give up, he would find his boy and they would find their way home.

He wandered the worlds, as this was the time in which all worlds were connected, all roads passing through the multitude. He searched and searched, seeing many places and many people, but none of them his son.

He would come across children sometimes – sometimes they were alone, and others were in small groups, young children with hope in their bright young eyes and blades in the shape of keys clutched in their hands. He would ask for his son, and they would never know him, but they told him of their destiny.

They told him of Keyblades, of the hundreds of youths from fallen worlds, youths searching for adventure, clutching their weapons in their hands as they fought bravely to stem the tide of darkness and bring light back to the worlds. They told him of their fight and they told him with eyes shining with hope and courage and hearts full of light, and every time he left them he felt that much lighter himself. It was hard to despair when you were faced with that much light and hope and courage, even if the wielders were children, even if each little face he met could have been his son’s, but wasn’t.

Seven long years Braig spent wandering, seven years of naught but dead ends and worlds empty of the one person he sought. Seven years of watching children fight a war that should belong to adults, watching children prove braver and wiser and more hopeful than anything else, even as eyes grew too old for young faces and their numbers began to drop and dwindle.

Part of him wanted to help – part of him saw his son’s face in every boy and girl with those keys, part of him couldn’t bear the thought of more fathers and more mothers waking up in their homes never to see their children again, never knowing why. But part of him knew he was helpless, useless – he had no key of his own, he had no means to fight the Darkness, and he had no way to help. So he would keep searching for his little boy, and hope for the children’s sakes that the war ended soon.

The war did end, though, and the war ended brutally. It ended with children killing each other in a field of weapons turned to gravestones, the only marker that the youths had ever existed their left-behind keys, a field of shattered hopes and dying lights lying silent in the rain.

The war ended and it took the worlds all with it, dragging the universe into deepest darkness. And Braig almost fell along with all the countless others – but something in him, some buried magic burst forth and protected him, warped time and space and dragged him to safety across centuries.

Once again he woke in an unfamiliar world, this time a bright and warm place, a radiant garden full of friendly faces and kind strangers. He was taken in, welcomed by the ruler and by the citizens, and upon realizing that the paths he’d once walked between worlds were broken and vanished, he resigned himself to settle there, to make a new home in this place he hadn’t chosen.

In the decade that followed, though, it almost began to feel almost familiar despite everything. The people there – friends he’d made, the stalwart axeman and the temperamental lancer, the neurotic scientist and his quiet adopted son, the wise and friendly king, and so many others – were almost a family, and the garden was almost like a home. Even if he hadn’t chosen it, it had chosen him, and he was almost content.

But almost is not enough, and that broken and missing part of him still festered in quiet, and one day, he was met with an old man carrying one of those keys – they keys that, to Braig, meant light and hope and a chance to fix everything, and in the hand of an adult who could carry that weight  – and he knew before the old man spoke that he would agree to whatever was offered, if only he could have a key of his own. For having a key of his own, Braig thought, would be enough. Having a key of his own would be the way he could make it all right again, the way he could find his son and bring him home.

The man with the key turned out to be a devil in disguise, however, and by the time Braig realized it, he had already sold his found family and his found home down the river for a chance to take back the blood family he’d lost – a chance that was all sweet-sounding lies and clever manipulations – and now he had nothing. By the time Braig realized what he’d done, the shard of Xehanort’s heart had buried itself deep within him like a parasite, eating at him from the inside out and changing him irreparably.

He looked in the mirror now and saw a face he hardly recognized, the scars of his follies traced deep into his cheek and burned into his useless eye, the marks of his deal seared gold in his vision and tracing grey into his hair. He looked into the mirror and wondered if his son would know him now, if he saw him again. If his son would love him still, if he knew what he’d done.

But that was meaningless.

It was all meaningless. The only thing left in his life that had meaning was Xehanort’s plan. That was what he lived for, what he was forced to do. And he’d do it, because no matter what he’d thrown away, no matter how alone he was, no matter how thick his web of secrets…if in the end, when the dust settled, he had his key and he had his son, then the blood and the betrayal and this deal that left him ruined and no longer in control of himself…it was worth it.

It had to be worth it, he told himself over and over again. It had to be worth it.

Even if he had to face down so many more children with keys, children that shouldn’t be fighting, children with homes and families and parents waiting for them  – he’d do it. Even if he had to betray his found family over and over, knowing they’d all either die or become slaves to Xehanort’s heart because of what he’d done – he’d do it.

He’d do anything to get that key and to get what he wanted, because it was the only thing he had left.

[alegriaspain]

The Road to Barcelona

We did actually make a couple of sales, one to the Spanish stock market (by inviting their tech director down from Madrid and getting him drunk) and the other to the Catalan health service, which took an excruciating year to pay. That was the high point of what turned out to be a long slippery slope. From there I resorted to a strategy that the Spanish refer to as la huida hacía adelante, fleeing forward. Since my team understood computers, sound cards and telephone lines I decided to try selling audiotext, a system that permited users in those days to phone a number and, for a fee, hear the latest news straight from the source. It was a natural ap for a bigtime football (soccer) team and I contacted the Barcelona Fútbol Club. They expressed interest and we spent the next year pursuing that terrific lead, nearly wearing out my car zooming back and forth over the thousand-kilometer distance between Granada and Barcelona. I got it down to six hours and three quarters.

.

In one meeting with the club’s communications director we actually closed a deal. But the agreement had a hook in it. We had to pay them a million pesetas up front for the privilege of mounting and running the system for them. That was the log that broke the elephant’s back. It was a shame because the Barcelona team had (and still has) tremendous draw and the deal would have been a life saver for us. Then, of course, along came Internet and changed the whole ball game. Today they’ve got an online TV channel.

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There were more projects on that slope, including a telephone-wine-sales business in which 13 young women offered fine wines to Spanish gentlemen who liked wine and talking to girls. Nor were my shrewd girls about to miss a lucrative business opportunity themselves. Towards the end of the fiasco I discovered that few of them were also selling their own services. Now when I see a beautiful girl walking her dog I look at the dog. Then there was the communications agency, which was a modest success. In that business I learned to make websites.

Sometimes The Pearl Is Right Under Your Nose

Meanwhile, during all the years that I was losing money hand over fist careening around Spain in a suit, my sweet wife–who had told me when we met that she wanted to be a painter–continued unobtrusively to paint and sell her work. At the end of the 70´s she was admittted to study printmaking in the the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation under  José García Lomas, a wonderful maestro who was formed in print studios in Rome and Paris. The foundation studio closed in 1980 and Maureen bought one of the big etching presses, the tables, the tools and the inks and installed everything her own studio on the hillside below our house. From then on she was on her own and with time and hard work she became one of Spain’s best fine-art printmakers and and graphic art educators.

Spain dedicates itself intensely to all of its fiestas and Christmas celebrations are extravagant. They last for 14 days, from December 24 (Christmas dinner) till January 6, the Epiphany, the Day of the Three Kings, when children receive their Christmas presents. During these joyous holidays normal business slows to a halt, so there’s some free time available. On one of those occasiones at the end of the 90’s I asked Maureen if she would like me to make her a website. “Me, a website? What do I want a website for? I’m an artist!” So I made her five, one for her, another for her artists’ apartment, and three more on printmaking themes where she was featured heavily.

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So my sweet wife, who had only modest business ambitions, started to lift off as an international fine-art printmaker with exhibits in Spain, the US and various European countries. Besides that she began to receive commissions to do editions for companies in Europe and the US. When she got her first big commission she hired an assistant. When he returned to Argentina she found a friend from a nearby village, trained her, and has worked with her ever since. Everyone who works with Maureen remains devoted to her for life.

When Crisis Hits

When the economic crisis hit the whole world in 2008 art sales suffered mucho, and she asked me one day how much trouble it would be to convert our renovated henhouse into an apartment. “What for?” was my naive reply. She had a plan. We revamped the chicken coop/tech lab again and called it El Gallinero (“The Henhouse” in Spanish). Since then it’s been a creative refuge for artists from around the world who come to Granada to study printmaking techniques with Maureen. I’m her dog’s body. And her first admirer. I’m so proud of her. We celebrated our 50th anniversary last year. Now our grandchildren are having children. Time flies.

Another Look at the Scoreboard

Remember the scoreboard? Let’s have another look at it. Yes, my failings were great and my regrets are sincere. But on balance my mistakes and missteps took me to a far, far better  place. Ironically, my time spent in the military was one of the best things that ever happened to me. That sounds insane but the army for me was both bitter and enlightening. I discovered that life in the USA was turning into a nightmare. When I was discharged from the army after almost two years I left convinced that I had to leave the country. And I did in November of 1968. All of the misery and frustration I thus evaded during the Nixon, Clinton, Bush/Cheney, Obama and Trump years; as well as all of the richness and wonder that I experienced in Spain, I owe ultimately to Uncle Sam because he was the one who convinced me I had to leave. I owe him for a wonderful new country with enchanting people and gentle customs. I owe him for a perfect English wife whom I found on a Mediterranean beach, for an old stone house on a sunny hillside and a flock of kids and animals. I owe him for encouraging me to find an unexpected space where we could create our own homemade lifestyle. So thank you, Sam, I wish you well and I’m trying to help you out, though it may not always seem so.

A Little Bit of Satisfaction

My most recent contribtion to human life on this planet is a modest one but it makes me feel good every day. For the past few years I’ve been publishing a photo blog site of events in our pueblo. (This morning it was the hatching of eight goslings on the river’s edge beneath the village square.) It began with black and white pictures of our early days in the village at the end of the 60’s and continues with color photos of current events here. The site has been a surprising success. In its fourth day online it received 18,000 hits and has been going strong ever since, this in a village of 1,200 people. So our neighbors get to see how their pueblo has evolved over the past half century. There’s a bundle of nostalgia in those pictures.

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As for me, I would love to continue documenting our village for a few more years before I’m relegated to that great darkroom in the ground.

Back to Part 1

  Thanks for following commenting and sharing

Regrets? Well, Yes and No–2/2 The Road to Barcelona We did actually make a couple of sales, one to the Spanish stock market (by inviting their tech director down from Madrid and getting him drunk) and the other to the Catalan health service, which took an excruciating year to pay.

[ironleaf-rp]

Gridania Story-Go-Round: January Storylog

The Monkey & The Rooster

[19:05]Syranelle Ironleaf: "Our story begins with an old monkey; he is tired and his bones ache.  He's seen many moons and has lived a robust life filled with many great memories and many sad ones as well.  He had no complaints about his life, though, save one.  He had never fallen in love, never found a suitable mate, and thus had no children to pass his legacy."

[19:07]Syranelle Ironleaf: "He sat in his tree pondering this fact, even lamenting it a bit, when a spry young Rooster came walking beneath his tree.  'Hey, hey you up there!' the Rooster crowed, 'Why the long face?  It's a bright, beautiful day!  The sun is shining, the clouds are fluffy, so there's no reason to be so unhappy!'"

[19:10]Syranelle Ironleaf: For a moment, the Elezen pauses, peering at the empty right side of the stage.  Her nose twitched a moment, but she simply smiled and continued.  "I am uhappy," said Monkey, "because when I die there is no one to carry on after me and I, sadly, feel that my time is coming soon.  Everything I know, everything I remember, it will all perish with me and all I know will be lost."  Rooster let his comb flop over to one side, upset.  "O-oh, I see.  That /is/ very sad.  Don't you have any children?"

[19:16]Valgus Arvina: The weary old Monkey shook his head slowly, grimacing. As if he needed yet another reminder that he lacked the one thing he wanted the most! "I've none, Rooster. I have seen many winters and many summers. Indeed, the day is beautiful. The sun shines, the clouds fluff! Yet I have -seen- these things. I have known them for many and more years. Who will remember me when the long sleep comes for me? Who will carry on my legacy?" The Monkey shook his head once more, groaning with exasperation.-

[19:16]Valgus Arvina: Rooster scuffed his talons on the dirt and bobbled his head thoughtfully. Then, he cawed with a realization! "Monkey! Let go your despair! For just yonder, o'er the hills, there is another tree. Another Monkey! Quite fetching, if I may say so! Come down from your tree. Walk with me and together, we will meet her!"

[19:22]Rin Miyama: The poor old monkey, though his eyes perked up, still held onto a shred of doubt within his heart. He had lived a fulfilling life with suceeding at many feats, yet he had never known the simple joys of shared compassion. "All right, Rooster. I will follow you. But please, do not raise my hopes so high that my heart breaks when they fall." And at that, the pair set off. By the sun setting, they finally crested the last of the hills between the trees, a fair female monkey perched in though.

[19:22]Rin Miyama: thought.)

[19:22]Rin Miyama: "There, for your own eyes to see, another monkey such as yourself!" Indeed, the fair monkey appeared alone, however the older monkey knew not what to say. He simply stood, eyes trained on her swaying tail, until it finally gave an annoyed flick. "Well, what is it you are after?" Her voice rang clear in the evening air. "My time is precious, and I know not who you are, or why you have arrived?" All ready, the poor old monkeys heart sank.

[19:25]Syranelle Ironleaf: Monkey cringed, looking at Rooster in askance.  What was he supposed to do?  Beaming, the Rooster knew /exactly/ what to do to impress the ladies.  He was, after all, the master of his henhouse!  So, he demonstrated his rooster'ish prowess for Monkey.  Up and down the road Rooster strutted, comb all a-waggle.  He shook his long, luxurious tail-feathers, making quite a display of himself.  He scratched and pranced before ending it with a mighty crow, "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" >>

[19:27]Syranelle Ironleaf: Not knowing what else to do, Monkey saw, so Monkey did.  He strutted around, flapping his arms and waggling his head.  He turned his backside toward the She-Monkey and waggled his tail in what he hoped was an alluring fashion.  At the end of it, he puffed out his chest and yelled in all his Monkey glory, "Cock-a-doodle-doo!"  Then they waited to see the She-Monkey's reaction.

[19:32]Syranelle Ironleaf: "N-no... NO!" Monkey protested.  "I am shamed, look, she won't even speak!"  Monkey threw up his hands in despair and fled the hilltop.  However, Rooster was undaunted.  He turned to the She-Monkey, "My friend is simply so enamored with your beauty that he feels he must find a gift worthy of such magnificence!"  He winked and chased after his Monkey-friend.

[19:34]Syranelle Ironleaf: Rooster chased after Monkey, finally catching up to him near a spring.  "Look, you can't just DO that!" Rooster admonished.  "You don't just leave a lady standing there like that.  It's rude!"  Monkey wrung his hands, aggrieved.  "What am I to do?  What must she think of me?  I can't go back!  I won't!"  The Monkey seemed on the verge of panic.  "Calm down, calm down..." Rooster reassured his friend.  "We can fix this still!"

[19:40]Rin Miyama: Little did the old monkey know, a small butterfly had flitted from the budding flowers within the tree that held the fair monkey. "Dear, whaat is it that has you so speechless?" the whisper-like voice of the butterfly questioned. "You have told me stories of a strong, courageous monkey many a times, and the day I finally resolve to make my way over the hells to his tree, he shows up and makes a bafoon of himself!"

[19:40]Rin Miyama: Gently, the butterfly perched atop the sh-monkey's head, "Must I remind you of your younger days, chasing the tails of dimwitted monkeys half your age?" At that, the she-monkey grimaced as the butterfly giggled. "Perhaps. But I would like to see if this fool learns to follow his own mind, rather than the bird-brain of that rooster." At that, the pair giggled. However beyond the hills at that lonely spring, sat the old lonely monkey...

[19:43]Rin Miyama: "Fix this? I sounded like an old rooster with a frog in it's throat!" the old monkey groaned, burying his face within his palms. "No! All will be well!" the rooster insisted, "You simply must bring her a fine gift! Few things swoon ladies such as reminders of their own beauty!" The old monkey paused, staring within the spring. "Butt what out there would match the living beauty of one such as herself?" he pondered. The rooster guffawed, "Living beauty? Hah! You must find the shiniest bauble!"

[19:44]Rin Miyama: "It will outlast any /living/ beauty." With a confident nod and wobble of his comb, the rooster stamped his clawed foot. "I've swooned many a hens with the smoothest of rocks and the most glittering of coins!" His feathers ruffled as the monkey sighed, "It is simple!"

[19:47]Syranelle Ironleaf: "What could I bring her that could match her beauty?" Monkey bemoaned.  Rooster crowed triumphantly, "Why, bring her that right there!"  He pointed to the reflection of the moon on the water of the spring.  "That's the biggest pearl I've ever seen, that's sure to win her heart!"  Monkey looked at the luminescent glow of the moon, not realizing it wasn't a stone.  "Y-yes... look at it, so big, shiny, and round... it's perfect!"  Immediately, Monkey leapt into the water with a huge splash! >>

[19:49]Syranelle Ironleaf: Yet, the ripples of the broken water fanned out across the surface, scattering the image of the moon.  "No, wait, where did it go?!" Monkey exclaimed in dismay, splashing his hands around in the water, frantically searching for the 'pearl'.  "Where did it go?!  Rooster, help me!"  He whimpered.  "O-oh, uh... we roosters don't care for water.  I'm afraid you're on your own!"

[19:51]Syranelle Ironleaf: Monkey flailed around in the water, clearly making no headway at all.  The 'pearl' was gone.  He gave up and swam back to shore, now waterlogged and even /more/ unhappy than before.  "Maybe I'll just go back to my tree," he said dejectedly.  Rooster made his way over to his friend.  "You can't give up, surely there's something else a nice She-Monkey could want!"

[19:54]Syranelle Ironleaf: "Maybe, but it's too late now."  Monkey said, making his way back to his own tree.  Rooster trailed after him, still prattling on incessantly.  "What about food?  Or gems?  Or small woodland creatures?  Ladies like to hug things!"  The Rooster nodded sagely.  He knew these things, great ladies' man that he was.  "No, no... None of that.  It would have to be something extraordinarily special to overcome this humiliation."

[19:55]Syranelle Ironleaf: Then, it occurred to the Monkey that he knew of /exactly/ the right thing.  There was a flower at the very top of his tree; it was exceptionally rare, blooming only once in his lifetime.  Surely that would be worthy of the She-Monkey!  With a gleeful smile, he took of running for his home-tree.  Rooster, thinking he'd all but given up, set to chasing after him.

[19:57]Ryouta Sakamoto: On the brink of dawn, the duo arrived to the Monkey's home, and utilizing his acrobatic prowess he swung back and forth through the bough, up the branches and to the top... only to find that the flower was nowhere to be found! Shocked, stunned by this and in peril, he asked the skies for an answer... only to hear nothing. Until...

[19:59]Ryouta Sakamoto: Monkey's eyes fell from the blue sea above down to his companion, indeed, the very individual who had swooned many before with those magnificent feathers. Those feathers which... caught the glimpse of the sun. Was the answer in front of him all along? "Rooster!" He called out. "I have a favor to ask."

[20:04]Rin Miyama: "Please, Rooster, fetch the lovely monkey from her tree! I have something even more splendid than the pearl within the spring! And hurry!" At that, the rooster fluffed his feathers and tossed his comb, "I will be back before you can say--" "Hurry!" the the monkey cut off the rooster before delving back into his tree. Off scurried the fowl, grumbling to himself as he went. All the while the old monkey set to his plan. Barely enough time to spare, by the time the rooster had returned with >>

[20:06]Rin Miyama: the she-monkey, the air surrounding the tree was alight with the faint buzzing and gentle pulsing lights of fireflies. Stopping in wonder, the she-monkey felt a smile tug at the corners of her lips. During her hurried walk, she had wondered what the old monkey had in store as the rooster had squawked to her about his amazing and wondrously vague plan. As agile and dextrous as a leaf floating through the wind, she lept and climbed into the tree.

[20:12]Zhan'a Rakhin: The she-monkey poked at a passing firefly, holding out a lanky arm to the glittering display. "I have never seen so many in one place," she manages as the insects twirl about. "What is your secret?" With a sly grin, Monkey shook his head. "No secret! Fireflies love to perform is all. The problem is just getting them in one spot. I didn't have any sheet music for them, so it turned into a bit of an improv-" His words are cut off when his lady friend gave him a quick hug, fireflies sitting on ~

[20:14]Zhan'a Rakhin: each of her ears before they began to dance. So close, she could hear the faintest voices as they sang. Or possibly sang. It might just have been a very loud rustle of the wings, but close enough. However, one particularly bright firelight came between the couple as they parted. "We danced for the lady, so where's the pay, fur brain?" came a tiny voice. Monkey blanched under his fur. He hadn't thought that part through. "Well, I do have one thing..."

[20:18]Syranelle Ironleaf: Monkey took the fireflies into his tree, gesturing to it with a hand.  "This is the oldest and hardiest tree in the land.  You are welcome to make your home here for as long as you live."  The fireflies seemed overjoyed at this revelation and danced around the monkey pair while below Rooster let out a joyous crow.  "That's the spirit!  I knew you could do it!"  The Monkey smiled at his friend and nodded.  "You did, if it wasn't for you, I would not have had the courage to do this."  >>

[20:20]Syranelle Ironleaf: Monkey looked up at his tree, now lit by fireflies.  "They will need someone to watch over them, though, when I am gone."  He looked down at his feathered friend.  "Perhaps when that time comes, you'll take over guardianship of this tree?"  Rooster stared up at his friend, humbled.  "I... I would be honored to look after your tree and our bright little friends.  They were the key to your happiness after so long a life, after all!"

[20:23]Syranelle Ironleaf: And so it was that the Monkey moved forward in happiness and in love.  He continued to grow old, as time took its toll, so when he came near to the end of his life he sent for his old friend the Rooster.  The finely-feathered fowl stood at his bedside, too strong and brave to weep.  "I'm here, old friend, to fulfill my promise."  Monkey looked up at him, smiling.  "Good, I have just one last thing to tell you..."

[20:25]Ryouta Sakamoto: "I love you, Rooster." Monkey croked and fell to his long sleep where he would be with the she-monkey, happily ever after... which brings us to Rooster. He sat there alone, in his new tree fort. "I suppose it's time to find someone else to help now." He cracked open an adult beverage and pondered the future.

[20:26]Ryouta Sakamoto: Rooster wasn't as popular as he made himself up to be, no, he was quite lonely and in fact had many unsavory addictions. However, helping others kept him from the bottle, and packed up his feathers and made for a new friend, the fireflies would surely watch over the sacred tree.

[20:27]Ryouta Sakamoto: Fret not, I will not leave you all empty-handed. For it was one fateful night that lead the Rooster to the bar, where he found another like he, a drunk Hen. The two of them exchanged words and interests, and this will wrap up the story of the Rooster and the Monkey. (( Our thanks to everyone who came out tonight and to all our story-tellers that participated!  We look forward to seeing you all again in February!  <3  ))

[yes-dal456]

Five Ways Donald Trump Has Broken His Promise To Protect Social Security, Medicare And Medicaid In His First 100 Days

Donald Trump ran for president as a different kind of Republican. During the primary, he stood out from the crowd by promising to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He went on to make that promise a centerpiece of his general election campaign.

Even before the election, there was good reason to be extremely skeptical of Trump’s promise. After all, prior to running, he had called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, said that “privatization would be good for all of us,” and, in true elitist fashion, called for raising the retirement age to age 70, because “how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon?” Moreover, he selected Mike Pence as his vice president. Pence has a long record of attacking Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Indeed, Pence criticized Bush’s Social Security privatization proposal for not going far enough, fast enough!

It is clear that Trump understands how popular these programs are. Social Security has famously been called the third rail of politics – go after it and your political career is dead. In a 2011 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said he was on board with plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — but that Republicans should be very careful “not to fall into the Democratic trap” by doing it in the open, without bipartisan cover, or they would pay the price politically.

So, did Trump mean what he said during the campaign? Or, did he say what he needed to in order to get elected, knowing all along he would break his campaign promise? Unfortunately, It looks like the latter. After only 100 days in office, he has already jeopardized his promise to the American people in at least five ways:

1. Championing a “health care” bill that would raid Medicare and gut Medicaid

The American Health Care Act, AKA Trumpcare, would be very destructive to both Medicare and Medicaid. Trumpcare raids $117 billion dollars from Medicare, depriving the program of essential funding and giving Congressional Republicans the perfect excuse to call for cuts a few years down the road. It cuts nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid, which would be a disaster for, among others, millions of seniors, who rely on Medicaid to pay for long term care costs, both at home and in nursing homes.

Trumpcare would also be a disaster for Social Security beneficiaries in their early 60s who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare. The bill would allow insurance companies to charge older customers far more, which the CBO estimates could lead to a massive 750% increase in their premiums. Not only has he not opposed these campaign-breaking promises, he is “disappointed,” he says, that House Republicans haven’t yet rammed this harmful legislation through.

2. Appointing Anti-Social Security Mick Mulvaney as Budget Director

If Trump truly intended to keep his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare, he would be surrounding himself with people who support that goal. He has done exactly the opposite. For the key position of Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, a member of the House Freedom Caucus well known for his fervent support of Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Mulvaney has enormous influence over the budgets of the agencies responsible for administering Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If that weren’t bad enough, he promised both GOP lawmakers and right-wing media personalities that he will push Trump to cut Social Security. On recent television appearances, including Face the Nation, Mulvaney has outrageously asserted that Social Security Disability Insurance isn’t “real” Social Security.

Obviously, Social Security’s insurance against the loss of wages in the event of disability, as well as old age and death, are all essential parts of working families’ earned Social Security benefits. But, it is not hard to see the method in Mulvaney’s madness. By Mulvaney’s Orwellian illogic, Trump could cut Social Security, but claim he did not!

3. Appointing Anti-Medicare Tom Price as Health and Human Services Secretary

Tom Price, Trump’s choice to head the cabinet department that runs Medicare and Medicaid, is just as dangerous as Mulvaney. Moreover, by virtue of his position, Price is a trustee of Social Security and Medicare. Talk about a fox in the henhouse: Price has said “nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.” and “We will not rest until we make certain that government-run health care [e.g., Medicare] is ended.” Trump has now put him in the perfect position to carry out that threat.

On top of his abhorrent policy views, Price also faces very serious accusations of insider trading, working with pharmaceutical corporations to block regulations they opposed and lining his own pockets in the process, but that’s an aside. Even if he were above reproach, his long history of wanting to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is a breach of faith with those who believed Trump on the campaign trail when he said he would protect these vital programs.

4. Instituting a Months-Long Hiring Freeze That Hurt Social Security Beneficiaries

Social Security doesn’t add a penny to the deficit. Indeed, it has dedicated revenue and an accumulated surplus of $2.8 trillion, out of which is paid not only benefits but the associated administrative costs. Nevertheless, only days after taking office, President Trump instituted a federal hiring freeze that included the Social Security Administration, which is already in a weakened state due to years of budget cuts imposed by Congressional Republicans. The hiring freeze forced SSA to turn away beneficiaries who came to their field offices for assistance.

Trump claims he wants to run government like a business. Any business that had a product as successful and profitable as Social Security would be increasing customer service, not restricting it. Making it harder for Americans to access their earned Social Security benefits – access they have already paid for – is terrible policy and a violation of Trump’s promise.

5. Staying Silent in the Face of Attacks on Social Security and Medicare From His Own Administration and Party Leadership

During the election, Trump had no problem attacking leaders in his own party for supporting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cuts. He went so far as to say “they want to really cut [Social Security], and they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans, and I’m not going to do that” and even called out Paul Ryan by name. He, also, has not lost his flair for tweeting.

But since the election, Trump has been completely silent in the face of attacks on Social Security and Medicare from GOP leaders. Not one comment. Not one tweet.

Just days after the election, Ryan made it clear that he plans to make 2017 the year that he finally accomplishes his decades long goal of destroying Medicare via privatization. Trump said nothing. In December, the Republican Chair of the House Social Security Subcommittee introduced a bill to gut Social Security. Trump said nothing. This silence even extends to his own administration. Mulvaney is all over television attacking Social Security and saying that Trump’s promise isn’t binding, and the president has declined to reprimand him.

A few weeks ago, reports emerged that the White House was considering, as part of its tax plan, the idea of weakening Social Security, perhaps fatally, by raiding a substantial part of its dedicated revenue. Though that proposal has not yet emerged, the tax proposals that have been released have encouraged right-wing ideologues to argue, in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page and elsewhere, that the proposed tax cuts for corporations and billionaires are great but would be even better if they were paid for by cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Still, Trump has said nothing.

As Trump acknowledged during the primaries, Republican politicians are hostile to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Even though Trump’s first 100 days have shown no fidelity to his campaign promise, it is not too late for him to prove he really is different from the Republican establishment.

He can repudiate that part of Trumpcare that undermines his promise. He can make clear that Mulvaney and Price are not running the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid show. He can propose and push for the adequate funding of SSA and the part of HHS responsible for the administration of Medicare and Medicaid. And most important, he can attack those in his party who propose dismantling these essential programs and tweet his continued commitment to them.

If he was not just conning the public when he promised to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, he should do all of those things. The first 100 days should not make any of us hold our breath in anticipation, though.

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